CHAPTER 1
GOOD THINGS OUT OF NAZARETH
Residing in a sparse room in New York City, Flannery O’Connor, a promising writer from Georgia, in 1949 gladly accepted Robert and Sally Fitzgerald’s invitation to live with them in rural Connecticut to finish Wise Blood. She first had written the novel at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and had hoped that it would be published while she was in residence at the Yaddo artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. Fitzgerald recalls O’Connor’s mornings dedicated to Wise Blood, after which “she would reappear about noon in her sweater, blue jeans and loafers, looking slender and most tall, and would take her daily walk, a half mile or so down the hill to the mailbox and back.”1 In the evenings, we would “put a small pitcher of martinis to soak and call the border. Our talks then and at the dinner table were long and lighthearted, and they were our movies, our concerts, and our theater.”2 In 1951 Robert Fitzgerald, a professor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard, sent Caroline Gordon the manuscript of Wise Blood.
Caroline Gordon at the time was married to Allen Tate, a contributor to the 1930 Southern Agrarian manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand, and the author of “Ode to the Confederate Dead” (later often anthologized). Gordon was a meticulous novelist in her own right. She for years deferred to Tate to the neglect of her own work. Ford Madox Ford and other critics believed Gordon’s Civil War novel, None Shall Look Back, published in 1937, was superior to other canonical war novels such as Gone with the Wind and The Red Badge of Courage.
When Gordon received O’Connor’s Wise Blood she was already tutoring a physician and would-be novelist, Walker Percy. She soon concluded that both O’Connor and Percy had great promise—and was one of a few in the early 1950s to recognize their potential. When Gordon first came to know them, the two writers were working in remote Southern settings—Milledgeville, Georgia, and Covington, Louisiana—far removed from publishing centers and the literary establishment. During their initial efforts at fiction writing, before they achieved fame, Gordon wrote Percy in 1951, “Well this is the season when the good things come out of Nazareth.”3
The promise of both Percy and O’Connor was fragile. O’Connor was suffering from lupus, while Percy had survived tuberculosis contracted during his medical residency in New York. While recuperating, he began to retool himself as a novelist and read himself into Catholic conversion from agnosticism. Gordon undertook, for a meager $100, a tedious, sometimes line-by-line criticism of Percy’s first novel, The Charterhouse. In 1952 Gordon sent him O’Connor’s Wise Blood as an example of what she considered the opposite weakness of Percy’s abstract tendencies in his fiction.
Gordon was dogmatic, opinionated, and undaunted by popular reputation. She took on anybody, including such luminaries as Faulkner and Hemingway. She wrote to another aspiring novelist, Brainard Cheney. She observed that William Faulkner was not the writer that Dostoevsky was. The Russian “rests squarely on the Christian myth, the responsibility for which rests on God. He did not have to create a new heaven and earth, as some secular writers seem to feel called on to do.”4 Gordon also applied this theological insight to both O’Connor and Percy, who followed, she noted, in the tradition of Dostoevsky.5
The first letter introduces Flannery O’Connor when she first appeared at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the fall of 1945. Shortly she would begin crafting Wise Blood, published in 1952.
PAUL ENGLE TO ROBERT GIROUX
Paul Engle writes to Robert Giroux, Flannery O’Connor’s friend and editor, his recollections of her when she was a student at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop from 1945 to 1947. Engle was the director of the Workshop and was crucial in establishing the curriculum upon which other institutions would draw for their own programs. Engle’s recollections of O’Connor made their way into Giroux’s Introduction to Flannery O’Connor: The Complete Stories, which would win the National Book Award in 1971.6
THE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA
IOWA CITY, IOWA 52240
INTERNATIONAL WRITING PROGRAM
SCHOOL OF LETTERS
JULY 13, 1971
ROBERT GIROUX
FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX
19 UNION SQUARE WEST
NEW YORK, NY 10003
Dear Mr. Giroux:
Please forgive my long delay in answering your letter of April 26. After it arrived, I have written hundreds of letters in reply to the immense correspondence which this Program demands. However, I did not want to send you merely a quick note. As so often, the really important subject, which is of course Flannery, was put off for the magical moment when an answer in any way worthy of her (and probably there is no way worthy) could be written.
Too many years ago, when I was Director of The Program in Creative Writing in the first years of its growth, Flannery came to the University of Iowa, although I did not know her. She was, I think, a graduate student in journalism. One day I was in my office when a shy knock on the door preceded a shy person, who stood at my desk in silence. By her eyes, I could not tell whether she was looking at me or out the window at the Iowa River below. I asked her to sit down. Fine dignity in the withdrawn way she shared that place with me.
Finally she spoke, uttered sounds which were surely in a secret language. I asked her to repeat. No comprehension again. A third time. No communication. Embarrassed, suspicious, I asked her to write down what she had just said on a pad. She wrote: “My name is Flannery O’Connor. I am not a journalist. Can I come to the Writer’s Workshop?”
She had been speaking her native Georgia tongue (most of which disappeared later). Of the world’s many difficult languages, this must be one of the most impenetrable. I told her to bring examples of her writing and we would consider her, late as it was. Next day, stories arrived. I read them with disbelief. Like Keats, who spoke Cockney, but wrote the purest sounds in English, Flannery spoke a dialect beyond instant comprehension, but on the page her prose was imaginative, tough, alive: just like Flannery herself.
For a few weeks we had this strange and yet trusting relationship. Soon I understood those Georgia pronunciations. The stories were quietly filled with insight, shrewd about human weakness, hard and compassionate. They were the original basis for her book WISE BLOOD. She was shy about having them read, and when it was her turn to have a story presented in the “Workshop,” I would read it aloud anonymously. Robert Penn Warren was teaching a semester while Flannery was at the University of Iowa; there was a scene about a black and a white man, and Warren criticized it as “unreal.” It was changed. Flannery always had a flexible and objective view of her own writing, constantly revising, and in every case, improving. The will to be a writer was adamant; nothing could resist it, not even her own sensibility about her own work. Cut, alter, try it again.
One day Flannery brought a story involving a scene between a young man and young woman about to make love. I began to give my opinion, especially about what seemed to me a lack of intensity, of conviction. She stopped me and said, “Not here.” Looking around at the corridor she added, “People. Can we go to a safer place?” With the manuscript, we went out of the building and across the street to a parking lot and there, sitting in my car with the windows rolled up, we discussed the appropriate phrases for the love situation. She was uncomfortable, but the wish to have it right dominated. It was obvious that she was improvising from innocence.
Sitting at the back of a room, silent, Flannery was more of a presence than the exuberant talkers who serenade every writing class with their loudness. The only communicating gesture she would make was an occasional amused and shy smile at something absurd. The dreary chair she sat in glowed. I have a large photograph of a writing Workshop having a party at a house in the country where I once lived. People are drinking, laughing, making faces, holding up children. It was wholly typical of Flannery that the part of her visible is her right knee, covered by a black-and-white checked heavy skirt which she commonly wore. There is spirit about that knee…
I am writing this in a little cottage on the beach in California, without carbon paper. Would you be so kind as to send back to Iowa City a xerox copy? I’d be grateful.
Paul Engle
Director
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO BETTY BOYD
A steadfast yet quiet anti-Communist, O’Connor had left abruptly in 1949 the Yaddo artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. O’Connor’s friend Robert Lowell, the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, had exposed an FBI investigation of Yaddo’s director, Elizabeth Ames, for colluding with a Soviet agent, Agnes Smedley. Lowell’s revelation is historically important because both he and O’Connor knew the crucial difference between “Soviet Communists” and “Russians” who appear in the fiction of the country’s great writers. Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, for example, is a Russian writer who writes about his countrymen suffering the cruelties and predations of the Communist government. Lowell’s exposure of an American colluding with a Soviet Communist is politically accurate. He was not stoking paranoia about someone colluding with generic “Russians,” a politically inaccurate and dangerously glib formulation. Lowell and O’Connor objected to the Yaddo director actually colluding with a known Communist committed to Marxist ideology. O’Connor and two others supported Lowell’s demand that Ames be dismissed because her association with Agnes Smedley compromised the artistic integrity of Yaddo. O’Connor and Lowell eventually left the community, O’Connor ending up in New York City.
Unlike most American writers, even the theologically astute Martin Luther King, Jr., O’Connor, as a Thomist, consistently understood the heretical nature of Marxism in theological terms. In the last paragraph of the letter O’Connor writes of the ideology’s demonic origins and its familial nature. Similar to C. S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters, she sets forth the idea from the master of demonic, familial conspiracies, Dante, in his presentation of a vast, escalating kingdom of evil in the Inferno, which he describes in the present tense—hell is an eternal state of being. O’Connor also provides another Dantesque formulation that also appears in A Prayer Journal: “No one believes more strongly in God than the devil.”
255 W 108
NYC
6/8/49
Dear Betty,
Your letter was most interesting to me re questions the FBI asked people about your mentioning Yaddo + Mrs. Elizabeth Ames. As Dr. B. probably told you I + 3 other guests, the total there at the time, left Yaddo after asking the Board of Directors to fire Mrs. Ames. We felt, although, we couldn’t prove anything, that there had been at sometime some measure of collusion between her and Communist guests who had spent time there—notably one named Agnes Smedley who stayed there five years + whose actions there were notably suspicious and who is to common knowledge an active Communist. Our action gained a good deal of publicity—not through us—and we have been assailed as people who want to destroy civil liberties etc. etc. Mrs. Ames continues in her post.
We found that the FBI had been watching Yaddo for years. The explanation to the questions asked about your mentioning the place can be one of two: either all the mail that left Yaddo was noted (I don’t mean opened, but looked at in regard to the distribution +the same recorded) and since I wrote you two or three times from Yaddo, they knew your knowledge of the place; or, Yaddo has played a prominent enough part in espionage activity for it to be more or less a routine question. After what I have experienced lately, neither seems too fantastic although I incline to the former explanation.
If you know of anything else being asked about Yaddo or Mrs. Ames, it would be interesting to know what it is. After my experience there, my admiration for the FBI has greatly increased and my opinion of sociologists, never high since I got out of the shadow of GSCW, has got lower + lower unto death.
As to the devil, I not only believe he is but believe he has a family which in the extent + scope of its activities is a power to be reckoned with as stronger than all the dead and unborn put together. Also I believe no one believes more strongly in God than the devil, he having so much cause, and that in the end, we being what we are, its his testimony we will take. Yaddo has confirmed this in me.
I would be pleased if your literate friend would call me, although I don’t feel literate. Let me hear from you.
Regards,
FOC
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO CAROLINE GORDON
O’Connor recalls difficulties writing Wise Blood while she was a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and she seeks counsel from a Jesuit priest. Her Prayer Journal reveals that she accepted the Church’s authority, even though she might be disappointed with the literary knowledge of priests. O’Connor also is averse to parochial girls’ schools, a perspective present in these letters. Gordon was teaching at the College of St. Catherine in Minnesota and had written favorably about her experiences.
[NOV. 1951]
Thank you so much for your letter and for wanting to help.7 I am afraid it will need all the help it can get. I never have, fortunately, expected to make any money out of it, but one thing that has concerned me is that it might be recognized by Catholics as an effort proper for a Catholic; not that I expect any sizable number of them who arn’t kin to me to read it—reading is not necessary to salvation which may be why they don’t do it—but I have enough trouble with the ones who are kin to me to know what could be expected. You can’t shut them up before a thing comes out but you can look forward to a long mortified silence afterwards. I used to be concerned with writing a “Catholic” novel and all that but I think now I was only occupying myself with fancy problems. If you are a Catholic you know so well what you believe, that you can forget about it and get on with the business of making the novel work. This is harder to do, knowing what you believe, but Catholic writers ought to be freer to concentrate on good writing than anybody else. They don’t, and I wouldn’t know why. When I first started my book, I was right young and very ignorant and I thought what I was doing was mighty powerful (it wasn’t even intelligible at that point) and liable to corrupt anybody that read it and me too so I visited a priest in Iowa City and very carefully explained the problem to him. He gave me one of those ten cent pamphlets that they are never without and said I didn’t have to write for fifteen year old girls. The pamphlet was by some Jesuit who did reviewing. He seemed to think that A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was about as good as you could get. Somebody ought to blow the lid off.
Since your letter to Robert [Fitzgerald] this summer, I have been examining my conscience on the business of writing about freaks. I didn’t start out with that intention or any other but I found that I couldn’t sustain a whole character. Andrew Lytle [professor, Iowa Writers’ Workshop] saw a few of the early discarded chapters and said you keep out of that boy’s mind, you’ll get yourself messed up if you don’t. It appeared to me to be good advice, but then the only way I seemed to be able to make clear what Haze was thinking was to have him do extreme things. I suppose what I needed to do then was make it plain that he was a freak in the philosophical order and not the kind that belonged in a clinic and I don’t know if I’ve done that or not. This occurs to me now; nothing occurred to me while I was doing it.
I went to school to the sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet in Savannah and liked them but I wouldn’t much relish having a ring of them around my seminar; however, I don’t think it would hurt them any to be there. I have always had a horror of Catholic girl’s colleges. There seems to be a peculiar combination of money and piety and closed forms about them—this is all pure prejudice, I never attended one, and times may have changed. We have three of those sisters here, trying to start a school for the children. Two of them are former Baptists.
All these comments on writing and my writing have helped along my education considerably and I am certainly obliged to you. There is no one around here who knows anything at all about fiction (every story is “your article,” or “your cute piece”?) or much about any kind of writing for that matter. Sidney Lanier and Daniel Whitehead Hickey are the Poets and Margaret Mitchell is the Writer. Amen. So it means a great deal to me to get these comments.
I had felt that the title wasn’t anchored in the story but I hadn’t known how to anchor it. I am about that now. It won’t be a stout stake but it’ll be something.
I had also felt that there were places that went too fast. The cause of this is laziness. I don’t really like to write but I don’t like to do anything else better; however it’s easier to rewrite than do it for the first time and I mean to enlarge those places you mentioned. I’ve been reading a lot of Conrad lately because he goes so slow and I had thought reading him might help that fault. There is not much danger of my imitating him.
The business about making the scenery more lyrical to contrast with their moods will be harder for me to do. I have always been afraid to try my hand at being lyrical for fear I would only be funny and not know it. I suppose this would be a healthy fear if I had any tendency to overdo in that direction. This time, working so long on the book, I may have cultivated the ugly that it’s become a habit. I was much concerned this summer after your letter to Robt. [Fitzgerald] to get everything out of that book that might sound like Truman Capote. I don’t admire his writing. It reminds me of Yaddo. Mrs. Ames [Elizabeth] thought he had about achieved perfection in the form of the short story. I read in the Commonweal that his last book was better than the first one. The reviewer quoted something from it with great admiration about private worlds never being vulgar. I can think up plenty of vulgar private ones myself.
O’Connor mentions a friend, Robie Macauley—novelist, teacher, editor, and critic—who taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and also admired Wise Blood. She also hopes to return to Connecticut to resume living with her friends Sally and Robert Fitzgerald.
MILLEDGEVILLE
GEORGIA
MAY 2, 1952
I’m sorry you won’t be able to review the book but I am glad to have the comment on the jacket, where it will give pause. I thought you would be interested in Waugh’s comment which was as follows: “You want a favorable opinion to quote. The best I can say is: ‘If this is really the unaided work of a young lady, it is a remarkable product.’ End quote—It isn’t the kind of book I like much, but it is good of its kind. It is lively and more imaginative than most modern books. Why are so many characters in recent American fiction sub-human? Kindest regards.” Well, I am determined there’ll be no apes in the next one.
I have heard from Robie Macauley who liked it. He says his own novel has been accepted by Random House and will be published in November. I am very glad because I like him and what he writes. Today I had a letter from Cal [Robert Lowell]. They are in Saltzburg and he is teaching at the American school there. The letter was very nice and very much like him but it makes me sad to think of the poor old boy.
I haven’t worked my way up to The Golden Bowl yet, but I have just finished The Portrait of a Lady. The convent in that is the most awful I have ever read about. It beats the place where Julien Sorel was a seminarian. When the Mother Superior said she thought the child had been there long enough I thought I would jump out the window. This winter I read that book of Max Picard’s, The Flight from God. I was knocked out by that.
I do hope I will see you all this summer. I hope to get to Ridgefield [Connecticut] by taking it easy. I am about ninety-two years old in the matter of energy and will have to travel with the sterilizer and syringe and all such mess but I am looking forward to it.
O’Connor addresses an unusual topic for the modern short story. She also discusses the differences in prayers of believers.
5/12/52
I was very pleased to be able to read this piece on James and I have read it a couple of times by now and with wonder every time. Since my critical training, such as it was, took place in a lump at Iowa, I’ve always felt that it would be horribly gauche to voice any insights on a novel or poem that came via Catholic conviction. At the same time I’ve thought that if a thing is art, it has to take in enough to be catholic—at least with a little c—and that if it’s that, it is penetrable by Catholic standards. But aesthetics is way over my head. I don’t have enough of the proper kind of words. Anyway, as I read it, I felt that this was surely the normal natural way to react to Henry James; I mean the way God and Henry intended.
I get so sick of reading all this stuff about his “accident.” I am sure you mean to dismiss it once and for all when you say, “If he had been congenitally incapable of the marriage relation he would have written books different from the ones he wrote,” but this statement confuses me. I’m not very subtle; to me, it puts the emphasis back where you intend to take it off. I think he could have been physically incapable of marriage and still have written the books he wrote because I don’t think that that would have had anything to do with his talent or the Grace that he had to write them with. I guess you mean that if he had been morally or emotionally unfit for the marriage relation, he would have written different books, which I can readily see. Maybe I am being knocked over by a gnat here but I wish you would enlighten me. I arrive at the obvious only after lengthy research.
Most of the stories you used in it, I hadn’t read but I did find a copy of THE GREAT GOOD PLACE [Henry James] and read it yesterday. I thought the vision was more one of Purgatory than of Heaven. It wouldn’t have been much of a Heaven to a Catholic anyway. While he didn’t suffer there the young man who took his place was a suffering figure and wasn’t there a kind of communion of saints atmosphere between them? Also, although the Brother called it the Great Want Met, it was only a great want for contemplation and regaining of the self—it wasn’t the great want you think of as being satisfied in heaven. The presence of God is in the place but it is experienced only vaguely and never seen. Wasn’t St. Catherine of Sienna rewarded with self-knowledge in her visions of Purgatory, or rather when she felt she was actually there? I don’t mean that James thought of the great good place as purgatory but only that Dane was probably not as far up as he thought he was, or James maybe thought he was.
I will certainly pray for Mr. Tate in the air but my opinion is contrary to his. I always thought converts’ prayers availed more else they wouldn’t be where they are and that born Catholics are only born Catholics because they would be too lazy to save themselves any other way. But maybe this only applies to the Irish.
I am certainly indebted to you for letting me see this piece and I think it ought to be a book.
If Catholic novels are bad, current Catholic criticism is PURE SLOP or else it’s stuck off in some convent where nobody can get his hands on it. Sr. Mariella Gable ought to disguise herself as Freudina Potts and undermine the Partisan Review from inside. She could send the whole place to the devil.
O’Connor mentions working on a story about rural arson and the terrorism of cross burnings. She may have reworked the scene to craft her later story “A Circle in the Fire” and the ending of The Violent Bear It Away.
MILLEDGEVILLE
6/2/52
All this is very helpful to me and I intend to take the slow tour through Madame Bovary. I read The Craft of Fiction [Percy Lubbock] periodically but I am still at the stage where I have to worry more about if anything is going to BE then How. I notice Mr. Lubbock says Flaubert never had to hold down his subject with one hand while he wrote it with the other. Me neither. I have to go in search of it. I don’t know whether I get blood out of the turnip or turnips out of my blood. The novel I am writing now is very exciting to me but I keep writing the wrong thing, proceeding like the mole. It has three boys for heros—all very guilty and sharp. They burn a cross on one [of] them’s papa’s lawn and the cross is something different to each of them and something else for the papa, etc etc. It is going to be kind of impossible to do but I think it must be the impossibility that makes the tension.
My method is more liable to be affected by my mother’s dairyman’s wife than by Mr. Henry James. She hangs around all the time and all her sentences begin: “I know one time my husband seen…” It works like you say. He sees everything and she sees twice as much as he sees but she has never looked at anything but him. They both read my book and said: it just shows you how some people would do.
Don’t be amused by my profession of gratitude. It’s drastic and the fact I have had a few people apply to me for advice about their manuscripts but they are always hopeless, and have a mission, or are just plain crazy. One of them, a lady, said, “You use the block style, don’t you?” Another is a disciple of Henry Miller. The other is a bank clerk and when he brings a paper, he sits on the arm of the chair smoking heavily while I read it and every now and then his finger descends on a word and he says “See? That’s where I use much iron-ny.” It scares me to death when I think how good the Lord is to give you a talent and let you be able to use it. I reresolve to become responsible, and to Madame Bovary I go.
I do pray for you but it strikes me I ought to be praying for the logical positivists. A distasteful business.
Affectionately,
O’Connor mentions a visit to her friends the Fitzgeralds and their loss of a child. She also disciplined their son, Benedict, who years later became a skilled screenwriter and co-wrote with Mel Gibson the screenplay for The Passion of the Christ (2004). Fitzgerald also collaborated in writing the script for O’Connor’s Wise Blood (1979), directed by John Huston.
MILLEDGEVILLE
9/11/52
Last night I happened on this picture of your connection here. Since I had sent him two bucks in memory of Mark Twain (before I asked you about him), I figure I must have at least paid for the license. He [is] mighty well preserved.
I am up again now and looking forward to a recessive period of my come-and-go ailment. It’s very good working again. I am just writing a story to see if I can get away from the freaks for a while.
This summer while I was at the Fitzgeralds, I read “The Strange Children” [Caroline Gordon]. I thought it was a beautiful book, part one probably in the development of Grace in these people. Of the characters I noticed that the Catholic, Mr. Reardon, was the least filled in. Was that because he would have taken the book over if he had been? It was not his story of course but it takes some doing to put a Catholic in a novel.
I have just read “Victory.” Everything I read of Conrad’s I like better than the last thing. I’ve also just read the “Turn of the Screw” [Henry James] again and to me it fairly shouts that it’s about expiation.
Have you seen the Fitzgeralds? Sally seems to be having a bad time still. I had to leave in a hurry on account of my fever a few days before she lost the baby. Benedict [Fitzgerald] has had the chicken pox but they say it has only given him more zest—which he didn’t particularly need. The day before I left, he climbed in the car, drove it twelve feet over a chair and into a pile of rocks, climbed out the window, looking exactly like Charles Lindburg, and received a whipping from me (Sally was in bed sick) as if it were a great honor.
I suspect you are getting ready for Minnesota.
O’Connor is pleased that Gordon approves of “The River.” O’Connor is also working on a story that would become a novel a few years later, The Violent Bear It Away. She also praises one of Gordon’s most famous stories, “Old Red,” which taught O’Connor much about writing fiction (The Collected Stories of Caroline Gordon, Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1981).
[SEPTEMBER, 1953]
I am highly pleased you liked that story “The River.” I had been thinking about a woman baptizing a child that didn’t know what it was about for a long time and finally I thought myself up to the point of writing it. The Churches ceremony of Baptism is so elaborate! I keep trying to think of some way in fiction that I could convey the richness against the threadbareness of the other but my thought is none too productive. The Church takes care of everything and I am always struck fresh with it on St. Blases Day when you have your throat blessed. The One True Holy Catholic & Apostolic Church taking time out to bless my throat! And these people around here have to scratch their religion out of the ground.
Which brings me around to what I wish you would do in Rome—see those Texas Baptists that are there to convert the Italians. I think that is the story of the century and if I knew anything about Rome I would be at it myself but I’ll probably never get there. I saw the picture of one of them in Time—he looked like a clipped lion with a raging headache, a little like a stupid Cal. You could wring that subject dry!
Guess what I did this summer. I spent a weekend in Nashville with the Cheneys [Lon and Fanny]. They had me and Ashley Brown [professor, University of South Carolina] and we had a lovely time, mostly listening to Lon whom Fanny says is a non-stop talker. They had some people in one night and let me read “The River.” I like to read once I get started and quit thinking about it. They had a picture of yours of a peacock and some other birds and wild animals that I was much taken with. It was the only peacock I’d ever seen with the face of a mandril. My peafowl seem to just die for meanness. I have a cock and two hens left. She hatched one peachicken this summer and raised it big enough for a weasel to eat before he went to bed. Next year as soon as they hatch I am bringing them in the house and going to raise them in the bureau drawer. The Cheneys have been in Ripton, Ver. and were going by to see the Fitzgeralds on their way back home. I got to the Fitzgeralds too. You are the Oracle around there. Everytime those children do something awful which is none too infrequent they say Aunt Caroline let me do that etc etc. Benedict is very superior, having visited you. Things finally got evened up when they let Hugh visit the Maxwells. Now when Benedict says Aunt Caroline had a ferry boat, Hugh says the Maxwells had a bear-skin rug that was a real bear. When I left they hadn’t been able to rent the house yet and their trip to Europe was hanging fire but I am hoping they have got it rented by now.
You will see quick enough that I am enclosing two things. The one called “Whom the Plague Beckons” is the first chapter of my novel and that is all. There ain’t no more and I do not know where the next word is coming from. By the time I get it finished we may both be dead and gone to our reward. My intention is to take Tarwater on to his uncles, the ass in town, pursued all the time by the cross he didn’t set up—which he finally sets up on his uncle’s lawn with the appropriate consequences. It’s full of stuff but I am no where near it yet. The other is a long story (long for me) that I don’t know whether [it] comes off or not but would appreciate your word on the subject. I have sent both of these to Mr. Ransom [John Crowe, Kenyon Review] and have asked him to send me back the one he doesn’t want. Nothing like presumption. I would like to send something to Bottegha Osura but I would also like to paint the side of the house so I will be sending it to Madam McIntosh [Mavis] instead to have it buried in some fashion magazine for a price. I had one in the Sept. Harper’s Bazaar, wedged in between all the skeletons in pill box hats. It made me sick to look at it.
Since I aim to be so long about the novel I have inveigled Giroux [Robert] into saying they will publish a book of my short stories in the fall of 54—to be called A Good Man Is Hard to Find. They take a dim view of it of course and I take a dim view of it myself though it’s my idea. The fact is I am uncertain about the stories. Three early ones would have to be included and I can’t even bring myself to read them over. If you say so, I would like to send them to you and get you to say if you think they ought to be included. Did you see that one of mine in the Spring Kenyon [Review] called “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”?
One of these stories, the first I ever had published, was written after I had read one called “Old Red” which you are doubtless familiar with. “Old Red” was the making of me as a short story writer. I think I learned from it what you can do with a symbol once you get a hold of it. Beforehand I hadn’t even known such a thing existed.
I was mighty glad to hear from you. I live in a Bird Sanctuary but the birds are not enough.
O’Connor writes to Gordon, who is living in Rome with her husband. Gordon comments on stories that would make up the collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories (1955). She also has written O’Connor about her visits to different sites. Invoking the allegory of her own fiction, O’Connor applies the technique to Gordon’s experiences.
MILLEDGEVILLE
2 OCTOBER 53
You will think I never appear but what I am loaded. I don’t know if I’m writing these stories to keep from writing that novel or not but I suspect myself. Tarwater is a mighty sullen companion. Anyway it cheers me that you find him worthy. I’m distressed that dogs don’t root things up but we don’t know anything about dogs here. My mother won’t allow one on the place because she has the grande dame cows, all neurotic. There’s no such thing as a contented cow. If one of hers sees a particularly fierce horse fly, the milk production falls off. Also she won’t have a hog on the place. She just don’t like to look at them. I guess I will change it to hogs and then I’ll have to insert a couple of hogs somewhere in the scenery. I am a city girl. One time Mr. Ransom [John Crowe] had to point out to me that you don’t hunt quail with a rifle.
I’ve been scouting around in the Book of Daniel for a better title for the story but all the stuff there is too heady. What the angel really did was to make a wind in the heart of the furnace, like the wind that brings the dew. I need something that won’t wag the dog but perhaps I’ll think of the right thing before the book comes out.
I’ll send you the old stories by a slower freight. I have just finished this one and as is my habit I am very pleased with it. I always am for about twenty four hours. You are mighty good to look at these things and it means a great deal to me.
The Fitzgeralds [Sally and Robert] have found themselves a tenant and say they set off Oct 12 for Milan. This will be an experience for the Italian Airlines.
All I know about these people from Texas is they’re Baptists. I haven’t seen anything about them lately but last year they were raising cane about how they were being persecuted in Rome. Maybe by now some Swiss guard has walled them up in an unused catacomb or they have moved on to see what they can do about Spain. I think I could handle their end of it; what I have no idea about is Rome. You must feel you are living on several levels of reality, or maybe I mean see you are, right clearly—coming up from the catacombs to catch the streetcar or whatever. The Fitzgeralds sent me a clipping about The New Jerusalem—to be built by Eddie Dowling at Pinellas, Florida. A 4.5 million dollar project, an exact replica, the smell of camels, real olives from Gethsemane, etc etc. Dowling said, “Once the site is determined, you can have the custodian come over from the Garden of Gethsemane. Right from that day, you’re in business with an attraction.” All this is in the vicinity of Palm Beach. Non-sectarian. Big name stars for the major roles (Jesus—Gregory Peck; Mary Magdalen—Rita Hayworth). Tourists from all over the world. I see Haze and Enoch [characters, Wise Blood] prowling around here, sniffing the camels.
The enclosed from Peacock. His regards, my love.
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO BEVERLY BRUNSON
O’Connor responds to one of the few local readers who has carefully read Wise Blood.
MILLEDGEVILLE
GEORGIA
9 DECEMBER 53
Dear Miss Brunson:
I am pleased that you can suffer to read my novel twice. Some months ago I met a lady who said, “Oh I haven’t read your novel. I can’t read much on account of my eyes so I only read books that improve my mind!” room for improvement I thought. Having a novel behind you is like having an idiot child at your elbow: people feel they must make some discreet remark.
A shrike looks something like a masked mocking bird. I don’t think it shrieks at night. What it does do is impale large bugs and mice on thorn bushes so it can eat them at its leisure. Altogether a good bird for a writer to have around but I forget where I have used it. Bird watching is actually too strenuous for me but I have a backyard full of various ridiculous looking chickens: Polish crested, Japanese silkies, pheasants, peafowl (these are beautiful), mallards, geese.
As for the abbot, he was not looking in the grave gratuitously; he was burying the dead, one of the corporal works of mercy which we are more or less required by necessity to perform from time to time. The contemplative vocation doesn’t thrive in cafes. H. Motes was actually a contemplative but the means to that life not being at hand for him, the only way he could achieve it was by violence—binding himself.
A Georgian cannot of course be against Coca Cola. We feed it to our babies, serve it to our guests, console the dying with it and expect it to make us loved throughout the world. It was invented right here, sprung full blown from the head of somebody, and we are very happy that its natural merit raised it in the public appreciation above some horrid New England drink called Moxie. I daresay the claptrap we have to make our way amid is no more ridiculous than it ever was or is. The point is to see it and beyond it to what it hides.
Regards,
CAROLINE GORDON TO ROBERT FITZGERALD
Gordon writes that Flannery O’Connor “is already a rare phenomenon: a Catholic novelist with a real dramatic sense, one who relies more on her technique than her piety.” This comment is the foundation of the correspondence between O’Connor and Gordon and the letters O’Connor wrote to her Jesuit friends. The emphasis on “technique” over “piety” extends back to medieval times, to another “Nazareth”—Florence, Italy—and its most famous writer, Dante. He is remembered for his “dramatic sense” in the sensational horrors of the Inferno and the beauty of Purgatorio and Paradiso. Relying on technique, Dante presents his faith in an implicit yet compelling way. His argument for the necessity of purgatory is conveyed not in a tract but in a story about climbing a mountain in the Purgatorio. Dante may be the greatest of ecumenical Catholic writers because storytelling overrides piety. This is the foundation of Gordon’s instruction of O’Connor and Walker Percy.
[MAY 1951]8
I’m glad you gave me Flannery O’Connor’s novel to read. I’m quite excited about it. This girl is a real novelist. (I wish that I had had as firm a grasp on my subject matter when I was her age!) At any rate, she is already a rare phenomenon: a Catholic novelist with a real dramatic sense, one who relies more on her technique than her piety.
I hope that old GS 40 hasn’t gone to my head, but I find myself wanting to make a few suggestions about this book. I think that it has real objectivity, but I think, too, that certain technical imperfections deprive it of its proper frame of reference and actually limit its scope. I believe that a touch here and there and a re-writing of two key scenes which she has muffed would do wonders for the form. I feel so strongly about this that I am going to go ahead and make the suggestions I have in mind and you can pass them on to her or not, as you see fit. After all, I know her very slightly. She may find me presumptuous.
But I am much interested in the book itself. Her general procedure seems to me sound. She is, of course, writing the kind of stuff people like to read nowadays: about freaks. Her book, like those of most of the younger writers, is full of freaks, but she does something with them that Buechner [Frederick] and Capote and those boys seem to be incapable of doing. Truman’s people, all seem to me, to belong in some good clinic. Her characters started out real folks but turned into freaks as the result of original sin.
She has one line of dialogue that I contemplate with envy: on page 142: “ ‘Blind myself’ he said and went on into the house.” You remember two lines of Ernest’s in To Have and Have Not: “Are those girls any good?…No, hon…” I always thought that those were the two fastest lines of dialogue that any of my contemporaries had written, but this “Blind myself” strikes me as being just as good. If this girl is capable of writing a line like that she is certainly capable of making the revisions this manuscript needs. I hope she won’t think I’m being presumptuous in pointing them out.
We—all of us, including the prospective godfather—await news from you all. Do let us hear as soon as you can,
CAROLINE GORDON TO FLANNERY O’CONNOR
A convert, Gordon is enthusiastic about teaching at a Catholic college. Reference is also made to the political extermination of an order of nuns during the French Revolution. This vital detail illustrates Gordon’s precise perspective on history. She distinguishes between the American War for Independence and the French Revolution. Conventional civic education in the United States rarely observes the crucial distinction and often conflates the War for American Independence with the French Revolution.
1801 UNIVERSITY AVENUE SOUTHEAST
MINNEAPOLIS 14, MINNESOTA
[MAY 1951]
I am delighted to hear now that you are feeling better that you have finished your novel. As you know, I was much impressed by the novel in its original form. There are so few Catholic novelists who seem possessed of a literary conscience—not to mention skill—that I feel that your novel is very important. I shall be glad to read it whenever Robert [Fitzgerald] sends it. I am going to write to Robert Giroux, too, and tell him that I want to review the novel when it comes out and that I would like to do anything I can to help—though, of course, there is little that one can do, or needs to do to help a good novel.
I had a letter yesterday from Will Percy’s nephew, Walker Percy, who lives at Covington, Louisiana. He says he has written a novel which he guesses is “a Catholic novel, though it has no conversion or priests in it.” I don’t know that your paths are likely to cross, but if they ever should I imagine that you’d find it interesting to know each other. He has been in the Church about five years.
Allen and I are crazy about Minnesota. Everything is on such a grand scale, and the city itself is very handsome, with the Mississippi river, to my continual surprise, running right through it. Frank Lloyd Wright was here, all right. There are a lot of modern churches, Mother Cabrini’s, shaped like a Viking ship, St. Ignatius, shaped like a fish, and then there is one church that has a dialogue Mass. St. John’s Abbey, sixty miles away, is the largest Benedictine community in the world. Three hundred monks and three thousand acres of this fat black earth.
I am teaching a seminar in fiction at the College of St. Catherine. I have about twelve girls and, each week, an outer circle of auditors, alumnae and nuns. The presence of the nuns made me rather nervous at first, but I am getting used to them. They are sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, an order that was almost exterminated during the French Revolution—I believe they had to give up the habit and lived about in caves or sheltered by peasants—till the order was finally re-planted and six nuns were sent to St. Louis, Missouri, from which community nuns were sent here.
I shall await the manuscript with eagerness. Many thanks for sending it.
CAROLINE GORDON TO WALKER PERCY
In 1951, Walker Percy sent Caroline Gordon his novel The Charterhouse for copyediting. Gordon foresees the ecumenical scope of Percy’s fiction that enabled him, like O’Connor, to reach a wide, diverse audience.
1801 UNIVERSITY AVENUE SOUTHEAST
MINNEAPOLIS, 14 MINNESOTA
Dear Walker:
First, let me tell you how very glad I am that you have entered the Church and then let me add that I’ll be glad to read your novel. I remember having a conversation about writing with you years ago at some party and in that conversation you revealed the fact that you already realized that techniques were involved in the writing of novels. A Catholic novelist who relies more on his technique than his piety is what is badly needed right now. I wouldn’t want to pass up a chance of discovering one.
Ordinarily I shouldn’t accept a fee for reading your novel, but since you are a Catholic I will ask you a fee of one hundred dollars. I need an extra hundred dollars for a sort of Catholic project with which I imagine you’d be in sympathy. Allen and I have two god-sons, a young man and a young poet, both very gifted, whose lives have been re-made since they entered the Church a little over a year ago. They are truly Benedictine in spirit and were long before they knew anything about the order and they are anxious to attach themselves to some monastery where they can put their considerable talents to the service of the Church. We both feel that St. John’s Abbey, near St. Cloud, is the place for them, but they are in Massachusetts, where they run the Cummington Press, and before they could do anything at all is quite expensive. If I read your novel I’ll apply the fee to their railroad fare. I think it may mean a turning point in their lives.
St. John’s Abbey, incidentally, is the largest Benedictine community in the world. It is great fun living so near it. In fact, Minnesota is a wonderfully exciting place for a convert. The Church here is more like the mediaeval Church. I suppose the French influence hasn’t quite died out.
My own order—I feel quite proprietary about it since I am teaching a seminar in fiction at the College of St. Catherine—the sisters there are an order that was almost exterminated during the French revolution and then re-planted at Carondelet in Missouri and sent from St. Louis to which at that time was known as “Pig’s Eye.” The sisters hastily christened it St. Paul.
I am delighted to be teaching in a Catholic college. I was getting tired of teaching—or trying to teach Protestants. One wastes so much time defining terms.
Allen and I both send you our best wishes and congratulations, or perhaps you ought to be sending them to us. I’m not sure which of us got to the fold first. Percy and Nancy [Mr. and Mrs. Percy Wood, daughter and son-in-law] and their two children were all baptized last spring. Our neighbor, Jacques Maritain, said that it was like the conversion of Clovis and the Franks.
Yours sincerely in Christ,
Caroline
CAROLINE GORDON TO FLANNERY O’CONNOR
Gordon mentions that her husband, “Allen” [Tate], is reading Wise Blood. As the letters reveal, however, Gordon does the hard work of copyediting O’Connor’s stories but often defers to Tate for commentary.
[MAY, 1951]
The book arrived just after I wrote you. I think the end comes off marvelously. And that was a ticklish job, too. I have been holding my breath for fear I had been giving you a bum steer, but I really don’t think so, now I see what you’ve made of my suggestion. It was all there implicit in the action, anyway, of course, just needed a little more bringing out.
Waugh’s [Evelyn] comment on your book is interesting. I don’t really think that he is a novelist. His Edmund Campion is a beautiful thing, but Helena is amateurish, at times embarrassingly so.
I am enclosing the piece of James I have been labouring on all winter. I’d like to know how it strikes you. I don’t feel that James has been read yet. Certainly, when read from the Christian view-point he yields some results he hasn’t yielded to any of the critics. I have a lot of other notions about his work that I couldn’t get into the essay. It is strange, for instance, that so many of his big scenes take place in churches. Strange, on the other hand, that he will present a convent, say, in the most stereotyped way: the one Claire de Cintre retires to, in The American, for instance. Graham Greene, in a piece called “Henry James; An Aspect,” says that the fact is that James was abysmally ignorant both of the dogma and the rites of the Catholic Church, though he was strongly attracted to it.
This house is in turmoil. Allen leaves Friday morning to fly first to Princeton where he will inspect Little Caroline Wood and other members of the family, then he’ll take off for a cultural congress in Paris, to be gone about three weeks in all. He’s scared to death of flying, but not as scared as he used to be before he joined the Church. I told him I would pray all the time he was on the ocean. He said that was all right, but he’d like to have a few nuns’ prayers, as well. He’d appreciate yours, too, no doubt, even if you aren’t a professional. He doesn’t seem to think that a convert’s prayers avail much.
We look forward to seeing you this summer. I do hope your health continues to improve, affectionately,
Allen read the first paragraph of your book and said “You can tell from that first paragraph that she is a real writer.” It is such an original, strong book! I am delighted by it all over again. You’ve got something that none of the rest of them seem to have.
CAROLINE GORDON TO FLANNERY O’CONNOR
The original eighteen-page letter is excerpted.9 It illustrates Gordon’s copyediting detail. O’Connor, of course, benefited from such scrutiny, which is rare in American literary history. Gordon perhaps engaged in such precision because she understood that O’Connor’s Wise Blood was a witty and dramatic satire of a fashionable theme in modern Catholic writers, such as James Joyce in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce’s autobiographical novel presents a favorable “portrait” of the sterile strictures of many facets of Irish Catholicism—drunken Churchman, mean Jesuits, and bullying in religious schools that the novel’s protagonist experiences. Recanting his faith, Stephen Daedalus becomes a cult figure of theological rebellion that O’Connor ruthlessly mocks in Hazel Motes in Wise Blood. He seeks to found an atheistic Church complete with his evangelical proclamations about the “Church without Christ Crucified.” Emulating other famous epiphanies such as St. Paul himself and St. Francis, Motes ends up blinding himself as a penance. He also has a version of a medieval hair shirt in the form of barbed wire he wraps around his chest.
1801 UNIVERSITY AVENUE SOUTHEAST
MINNEAPOLIS 14, MINNESOTA
ST. DIDACUS’ DAY
[NOVEMBER 13, 1951]
Your manuscript has come. I spent yesterday reading it. I think it is terrific! I know a good many young writers who think they are like Kafka. You are the only one I know who succeeds in doing a certain thing that he does. When I say that I am merely reaching out for some phrase that will partly convey my notion of your work. I do not mean that it is in any way derivative of Kafka. In fact, this book seems to me the most original book I have read in a long time. But you are like Kafka in providing a firm Naturalistic ground-work for your symbolism. In consequence, symbolic passages—and one of the things I admire about the book is the fact that all the passages are symbolic—passages echo in the memory long after one has put the book down, go on exploding, as it were, depth on depth. As that old fool, E. M. Forster, would say: “You have more than one plane of action.” (And what a contrast they are to the maunderings which he presents as his planes of action!)
Robert Fitzgerald reported to me something that you said that interested me very much, that your first novel [Wise Blood] was about freaks, but that your next book would be about folks. It is fashionable to write about freaks—Truman Capote and his followers write about little else. It astonishes—and amuses me—to find a writer like you using what is roughly the same kind of subject matter. But what a different use you put it to! Whenever I read any of the homosexual novels that are so popular nowadays I am reminded of something Chekhov said, that “he and she are the engine that makes fiction move.” That strikes me as profoundly true. One can write about homosexuals if one shows them as differing from normal people, as Proust does, but when a writer gives us a world in which everybody is a freak it seems to me that he is doing little more than recording the progress of his disease.
But homosexuality, childishness, freakishness—in the end, I think it comes to fatherlessness—is rampant in the world today. And you are giving us a terrifying picture of the modern world, so your book is full of freaks. They seem to me, however, normal people who have been maimed or crippled and your main characters, Sabbath, Enoch and Haze, are all going about their Father’s business, as best they can. It is a terrifying picture. I don’t know any other contemporary who gets just such effects. Genet achieves remarkable effects but for me they are all marred, finally, [by] his sentimentality. You are never sentimental.
I think that you have done a good job on the revision. I don’t really see how you managed it. The Fitzgeralds told us that you have had a severe illness and are only recently out of the hospital. There comes a time for any manuscript when one must let it go with no more revisions. I think that having done the job you’ve done you could let this manuscript go with a good conscience. But I am going to make a few suggestions and comments. They are really suggestions for your future work, but I have to have something to pin them to, so I am going to take passages from Wise Blood as illustrations of the points I am trying to make. If I seem overly pedantic it is doubtless the result of teaching. When you are reading a manuscript for a fellow writer you can say “I like this” or “I don’t like that” and he figures it out for himself, but if you are dealing with students you have to try to relate your reactions to some fundamental principle of the craft.
I admire tremendously the hard core of dramatic action in this book. I certainly wouldn’t want it softened up in any way. I am convinced that one reason the book is so powerful is that it is so unflaggingly dramatic. But I think that there are two principles involved which you might consider.
It is the fact that in this world nothing exists except in relation to something else. (I take it that being a Catholic you are not a Cartesian!) In geometry a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. Theology takes cognizance of a soul only in its relation to God; its relation to its fellow-men, in the end, help to constitute its relations with God. It seems that it is the same way in fiction. You can’t create in a vacuum. You have to imitate the Almighty and create a whole world—or an illusion of a whole world, if the simplest tale is to have any verisimilitude.
As I say, I admire the core of dramatic action in this book very much, but I think that the whole book would gain by not being so stripped, so bare, by surrounding the core of action with some contrasting material. Suppose we think of a scene in your novel as a scene in a play. Any scene in any play takes place on some sort of set. I feel that the sets in your play are quite wonderful but you never let us see them. A spotlight follows every move the characters make and throws an almost blinding radiance on them, but it is a little like the spotlight a burglar uses when he is cracking a safe; it illuminates a small circle and the rest of the stage is in darkness most of the time. Focusing the reader’s attention completely on the action is one way to make things seem very dramatic, but I do not think that you can keep that up all of the time. It demands too much of the reader. He is just not capable of such rigorous attention. It would be better, I think, if you occasionally used a spotlight large enough to illuminate the corners of the room, for those corners have gone on existing all through the most dramatic moments.
What I am trying to say is that there are one or two devices used by many novelists which I think you would find helpful.
Often one can make an immediate scene more vivid by deliberately going outside it. A classical example is the scene in Madame Bovary in which Charles and Emma are alone together for the first time. Charles’ senses are stirred by Emma, he is looking at her very intently. At the same time he hears a hen that has just laid an egg cackling in a hay mow in the court-yard. Going outside that scene somehow makes it leap to life. The very fact that the sound is distant makes the people in the room seem more real. Hart Crane uses the same device in a poem called “Paraphrase.” A man is standing beside a bed looking down at the body of a dead woman and grieving for her death. His grief is made more real by “the crow’s cavil” that he hears outside the window.
I think that this very device could be used very effectively in Wise Blood. Occasionally you get a powerful effect by having the landscape reflect the mood of the character, as in the scene where the sky is like a thin piece of polished silver and the sun is sour-looking. But it seems to be monotonous to have the landscape continually reflecting their moods. In one place I think you could get a much more dramatic effect by having it contrast with them. For instance, in the scene where Haze, Sabbath and Enoch meet, I think that the landscape ought to actually play a part in the action, as it does sometimes in Chekhov’s stories. If the night sky were beautiful, if the night were lyrical the sordid roles the characters have to play would seem even more sordid. After all, here are three young people trying to do as best they can what they feel that they ought to do. Sabbath wants to get married. Enoch wants to live a normal human life. Haze, who is a poet and a prophet, wants to live his life out on a higher level. You convey that admirably, I think, by emphasizing his fierce dedication to his ideals. But the scene itself is too meager for my taste. Your spotlight is focused too relentlessly on three characters.
There is another thing involved: the danger of making excessive demands on the reader. He is not very bright, you know, and the most intelligent person, when he is reading fiction, switches his intellect off and—if the author does what he is trying to do—listens like a three or thirteen year old child. The old Negro preacher’s formula for a perfect sermon applies here: “First I tells ’em I’m going to tell ’em, then I tells ’em, then I tell ’em I done told them.” It takes much longer to take things in than we realize. In our effort to keep the action from lagging we hurry the reader over crucial moments. But anything that is very exciting can’t be taken in hurriedly. If somebody is killed in an automobile accident people who were involved in the accident or who merely witnessed it will be busy for days afterwards piecing together a picture of what happened. They simply couldn’t take it all in at that time. When we are writing fiction we have to give the reader ample time to take in what is happening, particularly if it is very important. The best practice, I gather, is to do the thing twice. That is, the effect is repeated, but is so varied that the reader thinks he is seeing something else. Actually the second passage, while it interests the reader, exists chiefly to keep him there in that spot until he has taken in what the author wants him to take in. Stephen Crane uses this device often and to perfection in The Red Badge of Courage.
Yeats puts it another way. He says that in poetry every tense line ought to be set off, that is, ought to be preceded and followed by what he calls “a numb line.” He is constantly doing this in Major Robert Gregory [“In Memory of Major Robert Gregory”]. His numb lines do not slow up the action. They make it more powerful…
There is another thing that I think the book needs: a preparation for the title. Henry James says that at the beginning of every book “a stout stake” must be driven in for the current of the action to swirl against. This stout stake is a preparation for what is to come. Sometimes the writer prepares the reader by giving him a part of what is to happen. Sometimes he conveys the knowledge symbolically, sometimes he does it by certain cadences, as in “A Farewell to Arms,” when at the beginning the narrator says “The leaves fell early that year”—another way of saying “My love died young.” At any rate, however it is done, the reader must be given enough to go on, so that, in the end, he will have that comfortable feeling that accompanies “I told you so!”…
To sum up, there are three places in the book where I think a few strokes might make a lot of difference, this scene and the scene where the patrolman pushes the car over and the scene where Haze and Sabbath and Enoch first meet.
And one more thing: I think you are just a little too grim with Sabbath when she is nursing the mummy. I don’t like the use of the word “smirk” there. It is almost as if the author were taking sides against her. I think it would be more dramatic if you were a little more compassionate towards her. After all, she is a young girl trying to lead a normal life and this is the nearest she’ll ever come to having a baby—since she’ll probably end in the Detention Home. At any rate, the situation is grim enough without the author’s taking sides.
I will now—God help us both!—make a few, more detailed comments…
Well, that’s enough of that! I would like to see you make some preparation for the title, Wise Blood, and I’d like to see a little landscape, a little enlarging of the scene that night they all meet, and I’d also like to see a little slowing up at certain crucial places I’ve indicated, but aside from those few changes I don’t think that it matters much whether you make any of the revisions I’ve suggested. I am really thinking more of the work you’ll do in the future than of this present novel which seems to me a lot better than any of the novels we’ve been getting. But of course in writing fiction one can never stand still. Once you learn how to do one thing you have to start learning how to do something else and the devil of it is that you always have to be doing three or four things at a time.
But my heartiest congratulations to you, at any rate. It’s a wonderful book. I’ve written to Robert Giroux, expressing my admiration. My best wishes to you. I do hope that you continue to feel better.
Yours,
Caroline
NEXT MORNING:
I realize that in all this long letter I’ve said little about what I admire in the book. It is, first of all, I think, your ability to present action continually on more than one plane. Only writers of the first order can do that. Everything in your book exists as we all exist in life, mysteriously, in more than one dimension. When Haze runs the car over Solace Layfield he is murdering his own alter ego as well as Layfield. His Essex is not only a means of locomotion. It is pulpit. When he finds out that Sabbath’s father is blind he finds out much more than that. This goes on all through the book and yet you never succumb to the temptation to allegorize. I admire, too, very much, the selection of detail. You unerringly pick the one that will do the trick. And the dialogue is superb. But you will have gathered, by this time, that I am tremendously enthusiastic about the book. My heartiest congratulations on the achievement. It is considerable.
CAROLINE GORDON TO FRANCES NEAL CHENEY [MRS. BRAINARD CHENEY]
Mrs. Cheney was a professional librarian. Her husband, Brainard (known as “Lon” because of his resemblance to the actor Lon Chaney), was a novelist, political speechwriter, and essayist from Georgia. The Cheney home, Cold Chimneys, near Nashville, was a place of festivity and conversation for Gordon, Tate, and O’Connor, who enjoyed stimulating fellowship when they visited.
Gordon praises O’Connor and Percy.10 She also mentions friends, Andrew Lytle and Donald Davidson, a poet, essayist, critic, and faculty member at Vanderbilt University. Davidson, Allen Tate, and other Vanderbilt faculty formed the Fugitives, a network of writers who wrote modernist, intellectual poetry influenced by T. S. Eliot.11 Many of the Fugitives were members of a related sociopolitical group, the Southern Agrarians—Andrew Lytle was one of the most ardent and colorful. Some of the writers converted to Catholicism, including Gordon, Tate, and the Cheneys, while Lytle, calling himself an “old Christian,” did not.
Gordon also refers to another vital literary community, “the most unlikely Nazareth I know of: Sewanee,” currently known as Sewanee, the University of the South, an Episcopal college and seminary founded in 1856 in Tennessee. Walker Percy’s uncle, William Alexander Percy, had a home at Sewanee, Brinkwood, and taught at the university. He devoted a chapter in Lanterns on the Levee to fond memories of teaching there. The Sewanee Review is published by the university and frequently featured the writings of Gordon, O’Connor, and Percy while Andrew Lytle, mentioned several times in this collection, was the editor.12
465 NASSAU STREET.
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY
DECEMBER 29, 1951
Darling Fannie:
How sweet of you to think of me! This flowery square is going right downstairs on one of Joseph Warren Beach’s little tables to remind us of you every day. We think of you practically every day. We think of you particularly at holidays for I believe we have had more fun at youall’s house, whether on West Side Row or Cold Chimney’s, than any other house we know of. I would write you oftener, in spite of having absolutely no time to spare, if it weren’t for your hellish address. The first time I saw all those bristling numbers I knew I could never master them, and wrote them down carefully and parked them in a special place—not alas, in my ordinary address book—so I could have them handy. But the place was so safe I have never been able to find it again. I have repeated this maneuver several times. The last time was when your letter came a few weeks ago. Thank God, I have got it again, thinks I, at which moment the door bell rang. When I got back upstairs Allen, who, as you know, has few housewifely instincts, had come along and burned the envelope with the address on it up. Just trying to get the place straight, he said. Evidently I am not fated to possess your devilish address. Never mind, Lon will have it to forward this…
Walter Sullivan [professor of English, Vanderbilt] dropped by here a few weeks ago. He is on a Ford foundation grant observing creative writing classes. He was going to observe one or two other people and then hole up in Florida to write his own novel, and observe Andrew [Lytle, novelist and professor, University of Florida] for the rest of the winter.
Speaking of novels, strange things are happening. Twice in the last month I have seen the novel of the future—the novel they will all be trying to write—right here in this study. The two best first novels I have ever read have come to me last month. One is by Flannery O’Connor of Milledgeville, Georgia. Harcourt, Brace who have finally been persuaded to publish it, say that it is the most shocking book they ever read. It is a picture of a world, the world turned over to Protestantism. A sort of Kafkan effect that goes on exploding in your mind long after you have put the book down. There is no Catholic apology in it and Catholicism is mentioned in only one scene. A Catholic boy named Murphy invites the hero, a hill-billy who has lost his Holler Roller faith in the army and is now dedicated to spreading his faith in unfaith: “The Church without Jesus Christ”—well, better start again. This Murphy invites Haze Motes, the hero, to visit a whore house with him. When they come out he informs Haze that what they have done is mortal sin and that they will go to hell if they die without confessing it—and proposes that they go back the next night. But Haze is a real Protestant martyr and prefers to spend his time preaching the gospel of unfaith. The action is stripped to the bone. The light that plays on the action is like the flashlight a burglar turns on the safe he is going to rob—which is one reason HB were unwilling to publish it. Robert Giroux couldn’t make out what it was about, though he knew that it was something damned unpleasant.
The other novel came out this season of the year when good things come out of Nazareth, out of what I would have said was the most unlikely Nazareth I know of: Sewanee. Walker Percy, Will[iam Alexander] Percy’s nephew, after cutting a good many Didoes among the young ladies of the mountain—one was on the point of leaving her Episcopal minister husband for his sake—after all this Walker suddenly leaves the mountain, gets married to a little Mississippi girl whom Sewaneeans had never heard of, and lies doggo for four or five years. We had heard that he had joined the Catholic church, but had had no other news of him till he wrote and asked me if I’d read his novel, and sent it on in a suit case. I saw the size and groaned, then read a few pages and threw away the bottle of Wolfe-bane I kept on my desk for young writers who are taken with running fits, or as Uncle H. James puts it, “the terrible fluidity of self-revelation.”
None of that here. There are a few things he needs to learn, it seems to me, but he is learning them fast—all by himself, too. When he really gets to going good I don’t see what there is to stop him. He knows what its all about and knows what he wants to do. Allen and I both feel that he is just about the most intelligent young person that has ever come our way. Of course he is not so awfully young. Nearing forty.
Speaking of novelists, Lon doesn’t write as often as we wish he would. Still he’s pretty good about it. In every letter we’ve had he bewails the complications of his life which are certainly pretty considerable right now. (I also get a good many letters from Tommy Mabry [Thomas, The White Hound: Stories by Dorrance and Mabry] not so much bewailing the complications of his life as asking wistfully for a sort of certification to the effect that he is a writer. If he only had some of Lon’s courage!) I will be glad when he either gets that novel published or lays it aside and gets down to a new one…
The Catholic note creeps in sooner or later, doesn’t it, my fine feathered Buddhist Fellow Traveler? By the way, Eric Bell, Don Davidson’s son in law, is taking instruction from a priest. I expect to see Don himself in the Church within the next few years. Wont that be fun? We’ll just baptize Alfred while we’re at it. Poor fellow. He certainly needs it.
Allen is sending Lon today a book that he has been reading, with exclamations for the last week. Thomas Merton’s new book, The Ascent to Truth. That boy has finally learned how to write. But he had the sense to get him one of these greatest masters: St. John of the Cross. It is amazing to compare this book with The Seven Storey Mountain, which I still consider one of the most important documents of our time, but certainly no literary masterpiece.
This is a poor letter. I came home to find my desk piled even higher than usual with letters that had to be answered. One result of moving out here has been a perfect avalanche of semi-business letters. I am glad teaching a seminar in fiction at the College of St. Catherine here, and am going to teach at the Methodist university, Hamline, next term. After four years at Columbia, where you had to set the universe up fresh for each seminar, as there were no moral values which could be easily referred to, it is a relief to be teaching Catholics, even Catholic jeunes filles. I have twelve of them around a big table, with an outer circle of nuns. I was positively thrilled the other day when Mother Antonine wrote me that I was doing all right.
This recent re-reading of James has given me the illusion that I have discovered something about his work that has never been treated in print, though I certainly cant be the only person who has been struck by it. There is no use in inflicting an outline of the essay I propose to write. It will be in The Sewanee Review or something like it soon enough. I am going to call it “The Figure at the Window on the Carpet.” Now isn’t that a nice title?
We have no pets here, so I have become an indoor bird-watcher. I feed the birds three times a day. Mostly I just get sparrows, but there are two jay birds who come every day. I have got real attached to them.
June seems a long way off. But you certainly will be coming home then, won’t you? We hope to spend the summer at Nag’s Head [North Carolina] and are already trying to rent a cottage there throughout Huntington airn’s [sic] real estate agent. We decided it was best to leave the Woods in possession of Benbrackets [Gordon home], and there isn’t room there for both families. And we are both just dying to have some months by the sea. Maybe you and Lon can join us there during July or August!
We both send our fondest love. We can’t tell you how much we miss you.
CAROLINE GORDON TO WALKER PERCY
In January 1952, Caroline Gordon writes Walker Percy that Allen Tate concurs with Gordon’s criticism of Percy’s novel:
One trouble with the book is that the first sixty pages don’t engage. A man is shown in flight but since we see only what is going on in his head it is hard to realize that he is in flight and we have no idea what he is fleeing from. I believe it is almost axiomatic to say that you cannot begin a novel with a long soliloquy. The character must be shown in relation to other objects and other characters before we believe in his existence.
Gordon never fully grasped that Percy was writing fiction more concerned with “being” than “doing.” This view may be rooted in her teaching college students not attuned to existential fiction of “being.” Gordon’s reactions are not unusual—college students then and now are more drawn to O’Connor stories in which violent action predominates, such as a family murdered on the roadside or a Southern matron gored in a pasture by a bull. Gordon advises Percy to revise The Charterhouse to make it more like an O’Connor story: “The last chapter must be presented more dramatically.”
WALKER PERCY TO CAROLINE GORDON
Writing fifteen years later, when his second novel, The Last Gentleman, was published, Percy politely explains the existentialist fiction he has been writing. He notes, ironically enough, that Allen Tate’s famous “Ode to the Confederate Dead” inspired his novels. Despite the poem’s title, it is not about war dead nor is it a formal ode; rather, the so-called “ode” is about the paralysis of what Percy identifies as “solipsism.” The condition afflicts the protagonists of his novels.
TUESDAY [MARCH 1966]
Dear Miss Caroline:
Well, I do give myself credit for knowing the people to impose on. Plenty of people will tell me they like the book even though they may have reservations. A few will tell me that they like it except for such and such. But you’re the only one who can say what is wrong and why it is wrong.
You must know that I attend very carefully to what you say. And I even know you are right. The only trouble is that my faults are incorrigible. At least the fault which really raised your hackles: beginning a book with a solitary young man thinking. It reminds me of the time you were teaching at Columbia and some girl gave you a manuscript which dealt for the first two hundred pages with a girl lying in a bed in Paris and gazing at the wall—you saying you were so pleased when, on p. 201, somebody finally got in bed with her. Yes, right. I even knew what light I was sinning against and hoped to redeem myself by saying in the 4th sentence that in the course of the next five minutes something was going to happen which would change his life.
It is a deliberate sin and therefore all the more mortal, I reckon. I mean to say that, what with the times being what they are, one almost has to begin a book with a solitary young man. All my writings, for better or worse, take off from the solipsism which Allen described in his essay about “Ode to the Confederate Dead.” The best I can do is break him out of the solipsism.13
You are right about the tone.
My Uncle Hughes sent me a story-and-picture about you in his son’s newspaper.
It was very good seeing you and Fr. Charles—though I think Fr. Charles is nutty as a fruitcake. As good as he can be and delightful, and knowledgeable, and maybe even a good writer—but all I could think was, I would hate to be Father Abbot and try to figure out what was best for Fr. Charles. Father Abbot! I am haunted by the recollection of his goodness and sweetness of nature. My Uncle, an old-style Georgia Catholic and nephew of Archbishop Spalding, didn’t say so but I had the hunch he thinks the Trappists are a bunch of kooks, new-fangled Protestant Catholics etc.
Love and thanks again
Walker
CAROLINE GORDON TO WALKER PERCY
Replying to a letter from Percy on January 7, 1952, Gordon sends him O’Connor’s Wise Blood as an example of a novel with a plot and vivid action. She also warns Percy about the flaws of Brainard Cheney’s protagonist in his novel. Percy predictably is respectful but does not heed her advice in his published fiction.
465 NASSAU STREET, PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY
Dear Walker:
The Express Company swears it will come and pick your ms. up today. I put Flannery O’Connor’s novel in, partly for ballast, and partly because I thought you might like to read her book. It is an old copy. She has revised it twice since then and may not want it. So don’t do anything about it unless she calls for it. I should say that she and you have the opposite weaknesses. It’s hardly possible, I suppose, to “render” too much, but her story is too bare, too stripped, I think of all but the essential core of action. She presents none of the peripheral action which helps make the main action seem real. As I wrote her, her focus seems to me like the spotlight a burglar plays on the safe he is cracking. You don’t see anything else in the room. But she is sure good. This novel is more like Kafka than anybody else I know of. Every damn thing in it—and practically everything in it is damned. That’s one trouble with it: a world consisting entirely of freaks—everything in it stands for something and you only find out what it stands for after you’ve left the book and the events sort of explode in your mind. She has some dire illness and may die. You might pray for her.
Yes, I think a novel about New York City, with scenes laid in Bellevue, might be terrific.
But to our moutons.
You said one thing in your letter of January seventh that made me shudder, that you were reluctant to give up your angelic escape from the mountain-top. One reason I shudder is that I think you are in danger of falling, as a writer, for what Jacques Maritain calls the sin of the age; angelism. The shudders in me come from the teacher. I have just had the grisliest experience of my career as a teacher. Our old and cherished friend, Brainard Cheney, has been working for six years on a novel which he calls THE IMAGE AND THE CRY. He turned down good jobs, quit everything and plowed doggedly through it. There are five hundred pages. Red [Robert Penn] Warren read it, Allen read it, I read it, his agent read it and half a dozen publishers read it and all of us told him exactly the same thing. It is a prime example of angelism. He gives his hero a chair to sit on in his office but does little else to locate him in time and space. The poor fool sits there and thinks, thinks, thinks sometime for eighty pages at a time. It was done deliberately. He believed that he could focus the reader’s interest on thought, rather than action. This stubborn belief leads him into all sorts of absurdities. The hero and his mistress get in bed and have a good, long talk about freight rates and the C. I. O. Once when he pinched her leg I found myself writing “Thank God!” in the margin.
His story is, in a way, the same as your story: The modern man who wanders bewildered with no help from above. Lon’s hero is essentially a religious man. He finds what he is seeking in the primitive faith of the Holy Rollers and dies as the result of a snack-bite. A lot of these “Illuminists,” as Fr. Knox would call them, turn wistful eyes on the Holy Rollers. They see real faith there but don’t realize that the poor dopes are heretics.
But to go back to Lon. He is not a skillful writer, to begin with, and doesn’t understand the limitations of his medium, limitations which in masterly hands are often turned to great advantage. He doesn’t really know what a novel is and persists in doing something that can’t be done in a novel. He is, in other words, trying to use his feeble intellect as if it were an angel’s—what we are almost all trying to do, in one way or another, according to Jacques.
Let me sum up in my own Credo, in the hope that I can make what I am trying to say clear. A novel, any novel, in the first place, must be about love. There is no other subject. It is a romance. That is, it deals with something that is part of a whole. Human love—between man and woman, is the proper and only subject, as an analogue for Divine Love. St. Catherine of Siena says that we cannot love God directly. We must love him through our neighbour in order to be more like God, who loves us even if we don’t deserve his love.
The proper subject of a novel, then, is love, and it must be incarnated, as Christ was. Christ could not have accomplished the redemption of mankind if he had stayed in Heaven with His Father. He had to come to earth and take human shape. So does every idea in your head that goes into your novel. It cannot float in the aether—that is, you cannot have a scene that is not located in time and space. Your business as a novelist is to imitate Christ. He was about His Father’s business every moment of His life. As a good novelist you must be about yours: Incarnation. Making your world flesh and making it dwell among men…
CAROLINE GORDON TO BRAINARD CHENEY
Unlike in the previous letter, Gordon praises Cheney’s novel This Is Adam, published in 1958, which featured a prominent racial theme. She also comments on Cheney’s possible conversion to Catholicism. Sponsored by the Tates, the Cheneys became Roman Catholics in 1953. Gordon concludes by praising O’Connor and Percy.
2-16-52
…I have put my money on a good many horses, in my time, as you know. Scatter-brained though I be, I occasionally get a glimpse of the wheels going around. I saw them revolving here in this study several months before Christmas. When I was working on Flannery O’Conner’s novel and then Walker Percy sent me his novel. He’s got a lot to learn, that boy, almost everything, but reading that novel was like suddenly getting down on your knees on a long, dusty walk to drink from a fresh, cold spring. His novel and Flannery’s suddenly convinced me of something that I had been feeling vaguely for a long time. The Protestant mystique (which is what everybody who isn’t a Catholic, even Communists, are writing out of, whether they know it or not) is out-worn, sucked-dry, beginning to rot, to stink. That accounts for the curious dryness which almost everybody remarks in homosexual novels. There’s no juice left in that orange. Everybody has suspected it for some time, but the fact is now being brought into the open.
Flannery’s novel—as grim a picture of the Protestant world as you can find—and Walker’s novel, which is the story of a man’s desperate effort to stay alive spiritually, will be sensations when they come out. They will show so clearly that the tide has turned. One gets hints of it in almost any novel one picks up, but they come right out with it. Here’s another sign. Dwight McDonald is writing a profile of Dorothy Day for The New Yorker and has asked me to help him. Two years ago, even, they wouldn’t have touched Dorothy with a ten-foot pole. But the world is changing—fast—these days. Here’s another item that will interest you. Father Henry came to give Nancy his blessing after her accouchement and told her that a Jewish gentleman, who was so famous that his conversion would make international news, had just been baptized in his church by Fr. John LaFarge. Old Wise Woman Tate knows who it is, though Fr. Henry wouldn’t tell Nancy. Bernard Baruch, don’t you think? The Good News has got to the man on the park bench. Novels will take a different form from now on.
But you are stuck, half in, half out of the shell. The way you’ve been using your mind all your life is not going to help you. I don’t mean that you’ll have to give up using your mind that way, but you’re going to have to learn to use other faculties. Reason, the way you’ve used it, just won’t do the work. While I’m at it, I may as well compare you to another great man. Has it occurred to you that your situation much resembles the situation Allen [Tate] was in a few years ago? Except that you aren’t making a fool of yourself [as] openly as he did. His situation is very different now. I believe that he is happier than he’s ever been in his life. For the past two weeks he’s been getting up at six or seven and almost has his long poem in the bag. I don’t think that there’s any question that it’s the finest thing he’s ever done. It lacks that unmotivated violence that his work has so often had heretofore. And the writing is certainly the most beautiful that he’s done. Realizing what its all about has released energies that for years were chiefly bent to the service of his neuroses. If you didn’t know him so well I wouldn’t be saying all this, but I’m probably not telling you anything you don’t already know. You yourself must have marked the change in him. It is the result of the exercise of faith.
Please forgive me for lecturing you at this great rate. Somehow couldn’t stop once I got started. I’ll promise not to do it every time I write, though. And please write again. We can’t help but worry about you when we don’t hear from you. There’s just not anybody we’re fonder of than you and Fannie. Anything that concerns you two concerns us deeply. Allen sends his love and so do I.
CAROLINE GORDON TO WALKER PERCY
Aware of the precarious health of both Percy and O’Connor, Gordon (winter 1952) addresses Percy’s monitoring the recurrence of tuberculosis. She notes, “Many good writers have had their way smoothed by some such affliction.” Gordon enumerates (mistakenly) the American writers kept out of the Civil War by maladies:
Of the James boys, only Wilkie and Bob, the two dopes of the family, fought. Both William and Henry were hors de combat. Henry Adams was safe in England with his father and Mark Twain was ‘roughing it’ in the Rockies. Only poor Ambrose Bierce got into the front line, and he was not much of a writer. If we keep up our present draft system, which is so efficient that it’s hard for anybody to slip through its meshes, we’ll probably kill off all our geniuses.14
In an undated letter written a short time later, Gordon is delighted “to hear that you [Percy] are reading Henry James.” Gordon recommends two other books: “One is Advent by Fr. Jean Danielou, the foremost Patrologist in France. It is terrific. He tells you things about both the Old and New Testament that pretty near take the top off your head.” Gordon also praises (as she does to O’Connor) the “Life of St. Thomas More, by R. W. Chambers,” noting “this is above all, the book for Southerners, for Confederates, for any English-speaking person.”
CAROLINE GORDON TO ANDREW LYTLE
Gordon and her friends were developing a vision of history rooted in the patriotism of Thomas More. More’s defense of liberty was applicable to their struggle to come to grips with Southern defeat in the Civil War. In an earlier letter to Percy, Gordon had recommended a biography of More, noting that he “seems to me the greatest Englishman that ever lived. And the man above all whom we should follow today.” Percy responded by setting forth his view of More, which Gordon enthusiastically shared with Lytle. He was an ardent admirer of More, repeatedly quoting his dying words in his teaching and writings. Percy’s analysis may have influenced Lytle’s observation that More was one of the last defenders of Christendom against Machiavelli’s Prince, which “showed the princes of Europe they might rule free of spiritual counsel, looking only to their wills for guidance.”15 To Lytle, Gordon, Percy, and O’Connor (implicitly), the kind of liberty for which More was martyred was a resistance to the modern conglomerate nationalist “state” of Henry VIII.
APRIL 4, 1952
I had a letter from Walker Percy (Will Percy’s nephew) the other day in answer to some things said about St. Thomas More. That boy is sure smart: His letter is so good that I have copied the excerpt from it and sending it to you and Edna [Mrs. Lytle], for I think it will interest you.
Hastily,
Caroline
WALKER PERCY TO CAROLINE GORDON
I agree with you about St. Thomas More. He is, for us, the Road Back. For our countrymen, I mean, for southerners. For More is the spiritual ancestor of Lee. He is the man to pray to for the conversion of the south. One of the stumbling blocks to the Southerner (or the American) who is drawn to the Church is that he sees, not the Church of More, not the English Church which is his spiritual home, but the Church of St. Alphonsus Liguori by way of the Irish Jesuits. If he does go in, he must go in with his face averted and his nose held against this odor of Italian-Irish pietism and all the bad statues and architecture. Of course this is somewhat exaggerated and prideful, because it is a salutary lesson in obedience and humility to take St. Alphonsus. (Hell, he was a great saint!) But if Allen is forming a St. Thomas More Society I want in.16
I got the New York edition of James. (I would never tell you what it cost me.) But it is worth it…What gets me (in connection with your paper) is the way James’ heroes go diving in and out of Catholic Churches to collect their wits, or to hold interminable conversations. I have a theory about James’ indifference to the Church, or rather for the strange dissociations of his attitude: splitting off his great aesthetic reverence for St. Peter’s, for instance, from any necessity for taking seriously the claims of the Church upon him. It was the Age of Unbelief, if ever there was one. It would have been absolutely unthinkable for any man, however knowing and intelligent, to see his way clear to conversion. It would have taken an heroic amount of grace. Of course there are obvious reasons for this; it was the Age of the Success of Science; the great Victorian edifice was still mighty and secure. But I believe that there is a dialectic of Faith. Of course this is nothing new. But the dialectic is in our favour now; we are certainly coming into the Age of Faith. It is not so much Faith as the polarity of Faith-Unfaith. This alternative simply did not exist for our grandfathers or for James. There must surely be a providential allowance for the fix that they were in. I thank God that I didn’t live then. When I look at my father’s library, comprising as it does, many religious works, but all of the liberal-scholarly-protestant variety which stemmed from 19th century German rationalism by way of English divines, it gives me the creeps. It is much more lethal to the Faith than, say, the violent atheism of a Spanish Mason. They had a big middle ground in those days. Now it is being cut away.
James never had a chance. I am sure that the Road to Rome never even occurred to him, except as something “European” and therefore traditional and pleasant. The trouble was that all the other buildings were still standing and the Dome of St. Peter’s wasn’t especially conspicuous. Now the others have all fallen down and even I can see it.
CAROLINE GORDON TO FLANNERY O’CONNOR
Gordon mentions teaching a new interpretation of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to nuns. The interpretation may have been inspired by her copyediting Wise Blood, a dramatic satire of Portrait. She also praises the Chambers biography of Thomas More. The biography clarified for her that Henry VIII’s government was essentially a modern state with an intelligence apparatus. Informants of the Crown were bent on crushing dissent and consolidating power of the Machiavellian king who often instilled fear in his subjects.
1801 UNIVERSITY AVENUE S. E.
MINNEAPOLIS 14, MINNESOTA
I am not going to be able to review your book, after all. I stupidly forgot to caution HB [Harcourt, Brace] about using my name as a blurb and am therefore ineligible to review the book, Francis Brown tells me. I’m sorry. I am vain enough to think that I understand better what you’re getting at than the next reviewer.
The sisters who sit in on my lectures will read it with great interest, I’m sure. They continue to astonish me. The other day, after I had finished giving my interpretation of Joyce’s Portrait, which, to say the least, is not the interpretation that I was, so to speak, brought up on, one of them sighed softly and murmured: “That’s what Sister Mariella Gable has always said!”
I am so glad to hear that you have been feeling well again. If you visit the Fitzgeralds in June maybe we’ll see you. We hope to land in Princeton around the first of July.
Spring has come at last! All the ice is gone from the river. The sidewalks are at last clear of snow and ice and the grass is turning green. It seems to happen overnight here and a damned good idea it is. I don’t think we could have stood much more of that other stuff.
I have been having a great time all winter reading and re-reading The Golden Bowl. If you take into consideration three facts: a, that it is the only one of James’ novels that has a happy ending, b, that it is the only one in which a child is born to the hero and heroine, c, that it is the only one in which the hero and heroine are both Catholics, you don’t see James turning into a Catholic but you see the book turning into something quite different from what F. O. Matthiessen [American Renaissance] et al. would have you believe it is.
Allen appalled me when I had finished an essay on this subject by saying that I ought to expand the essay into a small book. The idea does fill me with horror—I can’t write expository prose. However, the fact that nobody will be anxious to publish such a book will probably save me from having to write it.
Another book we have read this winter is R.W. Chambers’ Life of St. Thomas More. It is simply terrific. Not having read it is for me a little like studying the Civil War from the Yankee point of view—you don’t get much idea of what it was all about.
I hope the stories go well and we look forward to seeing you soon.
CAROLINE GORDON TO FLANNERY O’CONNOR
Gordon writes about a retreat to a Catholic Worker House of Hospitality, which had a significant spiritual impact on her. Gordon praises Dorothy Day frequently to both O’Connor and Percy. Over a half century before Pope Francis in a papal visit to the United States cited Day as one of “four great Americans,” Gordon offered her own praise many years earlier.
SEPTEMBER 20, 1952
1908 SELBY STREET,
ST. PAUL 4, 1952
I was indeed glad to hear from you and so awfully glad to know that you are up and at work again. We were disappointed not to have a visit from you at Princeton. I found myself wishing that I had kidnapped you and taken you on there that day we had lunch together…
Allen is still reeling all over Europe—Rome one week, Venice the next, but he will have to come home by September twenty ninth as the U. of Minnesota, an institution that is doubtless far from his thoughts these days, opens on that date. He has had such a good time that he is positively dazed. At some time or other he was due to have a talk with the Holy Father. He had things he much wanted to discuss with His Holiness. I am curious to see whether awe in the pontiff’s presence will keep him from saying all he thinks about his fellow Scribner-author, Francis Cardinal Spellman.
I got to St. Paul about a week ago and have been busy settling into our new (rented) house. It is just heavenly to be able to unpack and hang your clothes up in your own (rented) closet. This has been a hellish summer. I have not got a chance to put in as much as one hour’s work on my novel and in the last few weeks I have been getting pretty peevish about it.
About The Strange Children, I think you are right about Reardon. He isn’t quite right. I think now that he is mis-cast. He had to be a “little” man, one whom they could all rather look down on, but he could have had another variety of littleness. I see a different character in his role now—a man who has little intellect and who would reveal himself more than Reardon does, trying ponderously to account for his conversion and never being able to, yet holding on to whatever it was stubbornly, nonetheless. Ah well—one reason for writing another novel is the chance to avoid the mistakes you made in the first! While we’re on the subject, I’ll point out another flaw in that novel…
I took advantage of Allen’s absence to go up to Dorothy Day’s “Maryfarm” at Newburgh to what she calls “the basic retreat.” It lasted five days. I had to come back in the middle to see Allen off, so got in only three days in all—rushed right back the minute he took off. It was an extraordinary experience. Dorothy says that for several years after she entered the Church she got little help, little more than platitudes from parish priests.
Then she went to a retreat given by Fr. La Couture in Canada. He is dead now but she keeps the retreat alive, training first one and then another priest to give it. It is tough sledding—this particular retreat is frowned on in many quarters.
They call their joint a “Hospitality House”—any bum is free to wander in off the road, and many do. The audience was therefore pretty motley. But you ought to have heard those bums sing the Latin Prime before Mass and two conferences in the morning, then dinner and a short rest and an afternoon conference and supper and another conference. I don’t think I could have stood up under five days of it, but when I got back from Princeton towards the end of the retreat they were all as fresh as daisies.
The approach was frankly mystical and I was reminded often of what Jacques Maritain says, that every real novelist is a mystic, “for nobody else knows what is in the human heart.” Jacques was invoked often. So were Aristotle and other worthies. And the whole series of talks was based on a figure of St. Augustine’s “pondus animae”—spiritual gravity, as it were. The father also threw in the mediaeval schoolmen’s demonstration of the existence of God and a good many other things that have hardly been heard of in the academic circles in which I move. It really was something! I had such a good time that I didn’t even envy Allen his trip to Italy. I guess we are going there in 1954, though. Allen has got himself a Fulbright professorship at the University of Rome for that year—I reckon Minnesota will let him off.
I do hope you get good news from Sally [Fitzgerald]. I haven’t heard from her since her illness. I do so hope things are going better there. I was dreadfully disappointed not to get over to Ridgefield but Sue Jenkins whom I was visiting at Sherman was ill and I couldn’t get transportation over at the time I’d planned.
Let me hear from you when you feel like writing. If I don’t answer you’ll know it’s because I’m wrestling with my novel. Getting back to work after a four or five months interruption is a grim business, isn’t it? Luck to you, always,
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO CAROLINE GORDON
O’Connor mentions suffering from the deadly sin of sloth. She was a student of Dante and Aquinas; the seven deadly sins suffuse her writing. Robert Fitzgerald, who taught The Divine Comedy at Harvard, recalled, “I am almost sure I lent Flannery the Binyon version.”17 Her handwritten notes to The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri (Modern Library, 1933), show a close familiarity with the poem. O’Connor enumerates Dante’s seven deadly sins in a list beside a diagram of Purgatorio’s mountain. Learning from Dante, she identifies pride, envy, and anger as “sins of perversion,” anger and sloth as “defective love,” and avarice, gluttony, and carnality as “excessive love.”18 Good Country Pictures is preparing a television series, 7 Deadly Sins, Seven Films Based on Flannery O’Connor’s Stories.19
O’Connor also refers to a visit from a Danish textbook salesman who cannot fathom works of charity.
MILLEDGEVILLE
5/20/53
I thank you the Lord knows for haranguing me twice on the same counts and at the expense of boring yourself stiff. This is Charity and as the good sisters say Gawd will reward you for your generosity. I hope quick. But you are wrong [in] one place—I do not suffer from the modern complaint of Abstraction; I suffer from the 7th Deadly Sin: Sloth. The slothful are always in a big hurry. I know all about it. And how it catches up with you before the end. My contrary disease is called lupus but it’s only the Aggressive Sloth made Manifest. I’d like to persuade myself that I hear time’s winged chariot and so on and so on but then I think you take such good care of yourself you’ll have the embarrassment of being around like your cousin when you’re 85, in spite of the ailment and the agony and the outrage. The effort to achieve some intensity is terrible but it isn’t as terrible as it must have to be or there’d be more intensity coming out somewhere.
Anyway I will work on this story longer. I keep asking myself: how would the dam [sic] woods look after two pistol shots? The Omniscient Narrator is running me nuts. I thought he could ease into a brain and rifle it and ease out again and look like he had never been there in the first place. Mine is just a bungler. Also I think I will start talking like Dr. Johnson as a matter of course—if this is possible. My mother says I talk like a n——— and I am going to be out sometime and say something and everybody is going to wonder what kind of people I come from etc etc. Her predictions turn out on the double and worse than true and here it is has affected the Om. Nar.
There was a man at Yaddo [Saratoga Springs, New York] who used to say Gide was the “great Protestant spirit.” I was glad they put him on the Index as it meant I wouldn’t have to read him. Otherwise I would have thought I had to. If I had charge of the Index, I’d really load it up and ease my burden.
Somebody brought a man out here, a textbook salesman for Harcourt, Brace [Erik Langkjaer]. He was a Dane and had studied at Fordham with Fr. Lynch and was interested in Dorothy Day. He wasn’t a Catholic and said what he couldn’t understand was why she fed endless lines of endless bums who crawled back to the gutter after every dish of soup. No results. No hope. No nothing, he said. The few Scandanavians that I have seen have impressed me as being very antiseptic about everything. I said it was Charity and there was nothing you could do about it. He seemed to be fascinated and disgusted both. What I can’t understand about them is the pacifism. If Charity were in the form of a stick I can imagine beating a lot of people over the head with it.
[illegible]. I will pray for you. St. Simons and I hope very much they’ll do this.
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO ETHEL DANIELL
A few years after Gordon asked Walker Percy to teach in a “School of the Holy Ghost” at a Catholic Worker House of Hospitality, O’Connor reveals her skepticism. She may have thought such a “school” could lead to misleading literary categorization. O’Connor distances herself from literary movements, a consistent theme in the letters.
MILLEDGEVILLE
6 FEBRUARY 56
I so very much appreciate your letter and your interest in my books. Fr. McCown told me something about you and I had asked my editor at Harcourt, Brace to send you a copy of a novel called The Malefactors, which they are going to publish in March. It is by Caroline Gordon (Mrs. Allen Tate) who came into the Church six or seven years ago. She’s a fine novelist—has been a fine one for a long time—and should be known by more Catholics. Her husband, a poet and critic, became a Catholic a few years after she did. They were both part (in the 20s) of that Nashville group that called itself The Fugitives—they were “agrarians”—such people as John Crowe Ransom and Robt. Penn Warren. The Tates were the only ones that ended up in the Church, although the Church seems a logical end for the principles they began with. That was all part of what is now pompously called the Southern literary renascence.
As for myself and wanting to be a “Catholic writer”—well, what I want, of course, is to be a better Catholic and a better writer. Sorry professional writers, no matter of what degree of piety, don’t do much good for the Church—I suppose I have to exempt sorry unprofessional writers like St. Theresa of Lisieux. Your Catholicism affects your art, no doubt about it, but an intense application to the discipline of an art or even some craft should intensify your Catholicism. I have about decided that form is one’s moral backbone transposed to the subject at hand.
I have written one novel, Wise Blood and a collection of short stories. The stories are the better of the two but both were the best I could do at the time and could not have been written, by me, a line different. I am afraid some of my characters are even more unpleasant that M. Mauriac’s and that you wouldn’t want to know them either. However, they’re all, even the worst of them, me, so my tolerance of them is supreme. I have pious and even intelligent friends who write me that the Catholic writer must write about love and redemption and not so much the lack of it. It’s quite possible to agree with this and to add, “Yes, and we’re all supposed to be saints.” I find the advice I get from the inexperienced is always correct but seldom possible. One writes what one can and prays to do better.
I heard little about Grailville [Ohio], not much. Is that writing center a press or a school for writers or what? I would be suspicious of a school for Catholic writers, as there’s no way special for Catholics to write.
I live in the country on a dairy farm with my mother. Milledgeville is 40 miles from Dublin and if you visit your connections there again, you must come to see us too. I don’t get about much as I walk on crutches—this, thank the Lord, makes me no good around the house so most of my time is spent writing and reading and watching some peachickens I have. My avocation is raising peachickens. I hope that when you read my stories you will let me know what you think of them. I don’t require my friends to like them and am inured to the fact that most of them don’t. All I hope is that all aunts who burn my books have to buy them first.
Sincerely and with many thanks,
CAROLINE GORDON TO WALKER PERCY
On November 25, 1952, Caroline Gordon writes Walker Percy, praising his revisions of The Charterhouse as well as the novel’s treatment of the “Negro problem.” Gordon probably had heard the phrase from Allen Tate, who had professional connections with Langston Hughes and wrote, “I know I am / The Negro Problem /…Wondering how things got this way / In current democratic night” (“Dinner Guest: Me”).20
Gordon, as she often does, addresses syntax and grammar. “There are not many different kinds of sentences that can be written. But you ought to have in your repertory at least three kinds.” She provides a recipe for a good paragraph:
Short declarative sentence. Declarative sentence a little longer than the first. Short declarative sentence. Sentence beginning with a subordinate clause or sentence formed by putting two clauses together. Declarative sentence. Declarative sentence. Long declarative sentence.
As in previous letters, Gordon also corrects Percy’s misuse of pronouns. She adds apologetically,
I am going on at such length, partly out of my natural irritability, and partly because I am so tremendously interested in your work. I think you ought to try to form the habits that make good writing. Maritain says that art is habit, anyhow. If you try to observe just these few things I have been talking about in no time at all they will become habitual.
Gordon concludes, “Well, you will have gathered that I am all for this book. In all the years I have been trying to help writers I have never had one who so richly repaid my efforts.” Citing an elderly nun, she notes, “You [Percy] are in a position to receive help from the Holy Ghost, which none of my other students have been in.”
Having finished the novel, Gordon writes the next morning that she plans to submit the novel to Charles Scribner’s Sons and “minor corrections” can be incorporated later. She recommends Percy read Mauriac and Bernanos, but observes,
They are criminally bad craftsmen, and hence, I think, theologically unsound, both of them—less Christian, according to Maritain’s definitions, than a man like James Joyce—There is Manichaean contempt for their craft, for, in fact, the whole natural order, that is fatal to a novelist. Damn it, they are not good novelists, either of them. Any first year student in a “Creative Writing Workshop” could point out the technical flaws in any book either of them ever wrote, but they have a range, they reveal a whole register—a plan of action—that is practically unknown to the contemporary “Protestant” novelist. I mean a man who writes out of the “Protestant” myth. They make a man like Hemingway seem flat, one-dimensional. I would not have you write like them. All my lecturing has been to keep you from writing like them, but I do wish you’d investigate them, nevertheless. I think that you might find them helpful in showing the way to some things that might be done but haven’t been done yet in the novel.
WALKER PERCY TO CAROLINE GORDON
Writing some years after having won the National Book Award in 1962, Percy praises the teaching of grammar and mythology in a creative writing class. He also recollects his friend’s wrestling with a frozen turkey at a Thanksgiving gathering at the Trappist monastery in Conyers, Georgia.21
FEBRUARY 14, 1974
Dear Miss Caroline,
A letter from Bob Giroux today reporting among other things, you’d sent him a mythology quiz you gave your students. He took it and flunked it.
Your life in Dallas sounds lovely.22 Since with God all things are possible, it even appears that the country and the church might be saved in Dallas! (Certainly not in Princeton or New Orleans.)
Either we must see you there, or you must drop by here on one of your visits East. You could fly into New Orleans, we’d pick you up at the airport and whisk you across the Lake.
I keep getting inquiries about your creative writing program out there. A smart alec Ph.D. at Tulane asked me if it was true you were teaching grammar. I said I hoped so.
Caroline II sounds lovely. Allen Tate II stopped by my brother, Phin’s on his way to Mexico last Fall. They liked him very much. Said he planned to be a farmer. A sensible choice.
If you come by to see us, you can wear your red flannel nightgown like in Conyers but you’ll not be required to deal with a frozen turkey.
Good luck on your antepenultimate novel—I’m hopelessly stuck with mine, hopeless because I can’t get it right and I can’t let it go. A rotten life—I should have stuck to pathology. At least after polishing off a body a night, one had a feeling of accomplishment. For the present, all I have is a title, The Knight, Death and the Devil [Percy’s novel Lancelot]. (Remember the Durer engraving?) (Don’t tell any thieving Texas novelists.)
Love,
Walker
CAROLINE GORDON TO WALKER PERCY
In the late fall of 1952 Gordon writes Charles Scribner’s Sons that Walker Percy is “the most important talent to come out of the South since Faulkner.”23 On December 8, 1952, Gordon writes Percy that Scribner’s is considering his novel and that she is “simply crazy about your book.” She notes, “I prophesy that it will sweep the country.”
Capturing the essence of Percy’s later published novels, Gordon specifically praises “Catholicism being implicit in the action (without even being mentioned)—maybe so. In this novel you are really treating of conversion—or lack of conversion, though, aren’t you?” She also mentions again her love-hate opinion of the “Catholic revivalists” (Bernanos, Mauriac, and Bloy). She criticizes “their poor craftsmanship,” which “would disgrace a first year student in a ‘Creative Writing’ course most of the time.” She does praise, however, the “higher plane” of their characters, which surpasses the “spiritual adventures” of Hemingway’s Lieutenant Henry in A Farewell to Arms and Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises.
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO CAROLINE GORDON
O’Connor discusses the perpetual tension between her writing and pietistic, didactic fiction, in particular a novel, The Foundling, by Francis Cardinal Spellman. She also is gratified by Brainard Cheney’s penetrating review of Wise Blood, which proved vital in advancing her career. She also cites William Faulkner’s appreciation of a new theistic element in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.
MILLEDGEVILLE
JAN. 29, 53
Thanks so much for looking for the missing page. It was the one before the one you sent but I will look for it in The Sewanee Review and send that to such of my kin as will be impressed with the sight of this much stately printed matter mentioning a niece. The size of it will fairly stun my 83 yr old cousin. Nothing stuns her but sheer bulk. Mr. Monroe Spears wrote me and asked if I had a story. My stories are adequate, there’s nothing in particular wrong with them but they sicken me when I read them in print; however, there’s that money.
I liked the piece in The New Republic very much but where it ought to be expanded is Thought. Though who reads Thought that don’t go to Fordham? Maybe it ought to be in Our Sunday Visitor. Could His Eminence keep it out of Our Sunday Visitor? My attitude toward him and his works (literary) is more lenient than yours and more crafty. It is—if we must have trash, this is the kind of trash we ought to have. This states your case and at the same time flatters the Cardinal. Somebody has to write for my cousin and she might as well have a prince of the church and with him so well-suited to the task etc etc. I suppose its a problem that there’s nothing for but the Holy Ghost. I dreamed one night about a Pope named April the 15th, and woke up thinking this must be Francis. Then I realized Francis would be the lst and this would be one of his descendants. It was a mighty comforting dream.
I read Middlemarch a few years ago and thought it was wonderful all but the end. I suppose that was a concession to the century or something.
I got me the Modern Library edition called the Best Known Novels of Geo. E[liot] then and thought I would have a great time with them but I didn’t. I started on The Mill on the Floss but that thing must be a child’s book or I don’t have any perseverance or those big books are just too heavy to hold up. I started on one about some Methodists and didn’t finish that either. I remember something from Middlemarch about “the roar on the other side of silence.” That’s what you have to pick up in a novel—I mean put down in one, I suppose. I want to read Middlemarch again and see if she wrote about freaks.
Do you know a man named Brainard Cheney? I found a review of my book by him in a quarterly called the Shenandoah that I hadn’t known but that comes from Washington and Lee [University, Lexington, Virginia]. It was a very good review, one of the only ones. This quarterly had a review of The Old Man and the Sea by Faulkner. He said Hemmingway had discovered the Creator in this. It was just a paragraph. I think where he discovered the Creator in it was that sentence about the fish’s eye—where it looks like a saint in a procession. I thought when I read it that he’s seeing something he hasn’t seen before; but I haven’t really read many of his books.
I guess you are right about Cal [Robert Lowell] I remember about the preacher who bought the sailor’s parrot but finally had to give him up because whenever he cried “How shall we get god into our hearts?” the parrot hollered, “Pull Him in with the rope! Pull him in with the rope.”
CAROLINE GORDON TO WALKER PERCY
Caroline Gordon informs Percy (January 31, 1953) that John Hall Wheelock, editor in chief of Scribner’s, had written her that Percy’s novel showed “flashes of great talent” as well as “serious weaknesses.” She also warns that Percy is almost “falling into one of the first snares that the Devil lays for young writers.” She warns about “stylistic laziness.” She cites Hemingway’s criticism of Gertrude Stein:
Ernest used to say that she was lazy by nature, though gifted and that when she found out how tough the going was she set about devising a way to spare herself and so created the style which is so admired by fairies. I never saw one who didn’t dote on her.
Gordon believes Percy is not “fitted by Nature, evidently, to take Gertrude’s way, so you gaze wistfully after Maugham [Somerset] and Marquand [John P.].” She encourages him to reread the Odyssey and to study the precision of James Joyce and Henry James. She also beseeches him to study her own technical virtuosity in the crafting of scenes in her books and to compare them to scenes in the novels by George Eliot. She concludes, “It is not necessary or even desirable that you try to write like me, but if you take to trying to write like Maugham please don’t ever tell anybody that I ever gave you any advice about your work.”
CAROLINE GORDON TO BRAINARD CHENEY
Gordon congratulates Cheney for his “political job” as a speechwriter for Governor Frank G. Clement of Tennessee. Even though Cheney published four novels, he is better known for journalistic commentary, speechwriting, and the vital article he wrote about O’Connor’s Wise Blood.
2-4-53
1908 SELBY AVENUE
ST. PAUL 4
You sure are smart! To work out a political job that will make you a living and give you time to write, too. Well, you deserve it. I am glad the new governor realizes how much he is indebted to you. And I’m awfully glad that you’ve got things worked out to suit you.
In the mail with your letter came a letter from Flannery O’Connor asking me if I knew a man named Brainard Cheney. I started to say “Like a book” when I reflected that our oldest and dearest friends are all sealed books to us, so I just said that I aimed to become your god-mother. How about that? Any hope for me?
What you say about your not being worthy to partake of the Eucharist reminds me that several weeks after I had been baptized my eighty three year old Jesuit instructor asked me if I was taking Communion regularly, whereupon I astonished the good soul by saying that as yet I didn’t feel worthy. “You never will be!” he snorted. “That’s the reason you take it.” I am also reminded of another pearl that dropped from the lips of Monsignor Cummings after some weeks of instructing the Cummington boys, “I never feel easy about a convert till I’ve buried him.”
I hope you and Fannie will run into Flannery O’Connor some time. I think you’d both like her. Cal [Robert] Lowell says she is a saint, but then he is given to extravagance. She may be, though, at that. She is a cradle Catholic, raised in Milledgeville where there are so few other Catholics that the priests would come to the house and make the piano into an altar, but she sure is a powerful Catholic. No nonsense about her! She has some dire disease—some form of arthritis—and is kept going only by a huge dose of something called ACTH. We are expected to adore all the Lord’s doings, but it does give you pause when you reflect that this gifted girl will probably not be with us long, whereas Truman Capote will live to a ripe old age, laden down with honours…
But I am leaving here March fifteenth to go to Seattle to teach a ten week course at the university there. Everybody tells me it will be pretty nice in Seattle then. I can hardly wait, though the winter here has been extraordinarily mild.
Allen is rushing all over the country this spring, making as much money as he can by lecturing and I am picking up every fee I can, too, so we can leave some dollars here for them if we go to Italy next year. All the scholastic committees have passed on Allen’s Fulbright application and it’s up to the FBI now, and as he hasn’t done a single subversive thing since he went over last August, they ought to pass him. But you never know…
Do let us hear from you again. We miss you both so much and long to see you. We think now that we’ll go abroad around the last of July. Any chance of your getting up our way before then? We also think of renting us a cottage or at least some lodgings at Seaside Heights, fifty five miles from Princeton. Why not join us there?
Sleep deprived, Gordon praises Cheney’s article on Wise Blood. She also resents the comments of famous writers, a practice that made her at times appear small.
2-10-53
I am so tired I can’t see straight but I can’t wait to tell you how good I think your review of Flannery’s novel is. Allen thinks it’s fine, too. It’s a long time since I’ve seen so much acute perception united with common sense in a review. Your remarks on Caldwell [Erskine] are marvellous: the best thing anybody has said about him. Your points are all telling, we both thought, and were made tellingly. I don’t blame Flannery for being pleased. I don’t know of any other reviewer who did half as well.
Faulkner’s remarks on Hemingway seem to strike a new low. Flannery remarked that “he seems to think Hemingway found God in a fish’s eye.” I wonder if he wrote those paragraphs when drunk. They read like it. I fear the Nobel prize has done him little good. Too bad…
I am making plans to leave this frigid zone on March 15. I am going to Seattle for ten weeks at the U. of Washington as visiting professor.
Do let us hear from you all again soon.
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO CAROLINE GORDON
O’Connor distances herself from Brainard Cheney’s article in which he refers to the Christ “myth.” O’Connor also refers to an image of the Church in a book by a Dominican that may have inspired her story “The River.” She also disagrees with a critic who suggests there is a lack of charity among writers.
MILLEDGEVILLE
2/22/53
I am much obliged for Mr. Cheney’s address. I wrote him that I liked the review though I had to admit that I hadn’t thought of the patrolman as the tempter on the mt. top or H. Motes as embodying the Christ “myth.” I leave the word myth to Mrs. Roosevelt anyway. The Fitzgeralds have a friend in the UN who took his eleven year old daughter to one of the sessions one day. He told her to act intelligent and to show that she knew who the people were he introduced her to and to say something to show that she knew. She did very well, he said. He introduced her finally to Mrs. R. and she said, “Oh hello, Mrs. Roosevelt, I always listen to your radio program while I’m waiting for the Lone Ranger.” Which is how I know myth! Maybe its the myth business that [is] keeping him out of the Church.
I do think with you all that the Cardinal is last person who ought to be giving the world fiction and verse and what I mean by its being the kind of trash we ought to have is that it’s several cuts above Mickey Spillane. I suppose Prudence is all you have to worry about in the order of trash and the Cardinal is very prudent though I think he sins against it in ways he don’t know exists. Anyway, you tell Allen its just as well he doesn’t acquaint himself with the great masters of the novel in the 19th century. That would be exactly your point of too much reading. He would go on fattening the foundlings with even more horrible prose. Somebody was so good as to give me The Foundling when I was sick in the hospital. I was taking big doses of ACTH which prevents concentration, but this wasn’t necessary for that. It was the purest pablum and if I had been fifteen years old, I would have liked it fine.
My trouble I suppose is the usual Catholic sin of not paying much attention to the Church’s temporal hard times, knowing the gates of hell won’t prevail. I certainly enjoy watching them prevail here and now, or anyway, when they’re prevailing in the Protestant body. Chief Thurn and the Sunshine Evangelistic Party are nothing to laugh at but I would mighty well like to hear the musical paint buckets and see the fourth singing heart in the world. When it gets around to Catholic vulgarity, that is too Business-Pious and being too close to home; hurts too much; hurts too much to write about. I’ve often wondered how JF Powers stands to write about it. It certainly must be a torture and be a strong man. The whole subject sharpens my sympathy for him. The other day I got a “check” for One Hundred Hail Marys on “The Bank of Heaven,” from a nun in a convent in Canada where I had sent a dollar for some mission or other. All made out with a picture of the Christ Child on it in the corner—“President,” and signed by the sister who said the prayers. Now this is worse than the Cardinal’s works. This is bringing it too close to the altar; his is a good distance away. I know the Hail Marys were said in all charity and may save my soul.
Have you read that history of the Church by a Dominican, Phillip Hughes? He says something to the effect that the Church is like a river and the times like a river bed and when the bed is low, the river is low but still pure.
I have just finished reading a piece in the Commonweal by a man named Lukac who says there’s no more literary correspondence and that good writers don’t pay any attention to young ones because there’s no more charity among them. This has not been my experience. I think of your detailed letters to me about my book and wonder what makes him so sure of what he says.
CAROLINE GORDON TO WALKER PERCY
On Easter Tuesday 1953, Caroline Gordon writes from the University of Washington in Seattle, where she is the Walker Ames lecturer. Viking Press has recognized her brilliance as a teacher of creative writing and has asked her to write a handbook, later published as How to Read a Novel (Viking, 1957). She writes, “One chapter, (thanks partly to you,) will be a comparison of Proust and Gide.”
In a letter of April 27, 1953, Gordon writes Percy a rambling, judgmental letter. She commends the submission of The Charterhouse to Viking Press. On May 6, 1953, however, the editor, Malcolm Cowley, writes Susan Jenkins, Percy’s agent, that Viking will not publish the novel. Subsequently, in another letter Gordon asks if Percy has cut the length of The Charterhouse for a submission to Regnery Publishing. Regnery, however, would not publish the novel.
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO CAROLINE GORDON
According to Caroline Gordon, modern fiction’s canonical goalposts shifted with the publication in 1952 of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood. The process continued in 1953 when Gordon, living in Rome, scrutinized, often line by line, the stories that would make up O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, published in 1955. The exchange of letters with Gordon shows that O’Connor conceived of A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories as a cycle with a coherent unity that set forth a dramatic exposition of the seven deadly sins modeled on Dante’s Purgatorio.
MILLEDGEVILLE
11/8/53
I enclose my new ending which you can plainly see is a heap better than the other one. That last one was just one more thing attributable to the 7th Deadly Sin, too lazy to do what ought to be done. The view point at the end may not be that of an eagle exactly but it’s at least a buzzard on a very high limb. I have also done away with the word—the not-word—“squinch.” This is very difficult as I have a natural fondness for it.
Will you please tell Allen [Tate, her husband] that Mr. Ransom [John Crowe, Kenyon Review] decided he wanted to use “A Circle in the Fire,” so it can’t be sent to Encounter. I was quite surprised as I thought he would want the chapter. Anyhow, he thought I ought to work on the story more, said it wasn’t as economical as it ought to be—Mrs. Pritchard talked too much and some other things, so I have written it over and sent it back to him. The speed with which I did this is probably unequaled but I told him he could send it back as many times as he could suffer to. I can’t stand to have them hanging around, over. He thought the chapter was a little complicated, that the reader had to work too hard, but he said he would print it too if I liked. I am afraid to fool with that right now. I rather think it’s all right as it is, and I have to get on with Tarwater even though it kills me.
My mother has a D.P. [Displaced Person] family along with her regular dairyman and his family. They are becoming Americanized fast. The little boy asked my mother the other day if gold came from Mexico, where did silver come from? My mother didn’t know. He said from under the Lone Ranger.
It’s getting cold here and my peafowl have ruffled necks all the time and step very high. I heard a great commotion out there the other day and went to find that the cock had taken on the entire flock of turkeys—about ninety five. When they would charge him, he would fly straight up and land on the shed roof and look at them a while, then he would descend straight down and scatter them. This would have gone on all afternoon if I hadn’t put a stop to it.
I’m much obliged for the Fitzgerald’s address. I reckon they decided Siena [Italy] was too cold.
CAROLINE GORDON TO FLANNERY O’CONNOR
Writing from the American Academy in Rome, Gordon notes the seminal importance of one of O’Connor’s stories. Gordon was one of the first to recognize the unusual ecumenical appeal of O’Connor’s stories.
SEPTEMBER FIRST, 1953
Yesterday I read your story, “The River,” sitting in the little inside court of our hotel on the rue Saints Peres. I am convinced that Lambert Strether once sat on the very chair I was sitting on to read that communication from his formidable fiancee, while Waymwars watched him through the glass. Jack Matthews thinks it was another court, but let us leave that aside for a moment. The point is what a beautiful story you have writte[n]. I had a feeling that it was going to be good from the moment Mrs. Connin took that little boy by the hand, and you sure didn’t let me down. Just as I finished the story, John Prince, a young friend of ours who practically knows every word of Eudora Welty’s “Petrified Man” by heart, came along. “There you are,” says I and he, too, was charmed. As was Ward Dorrance, another friend of ours and a very gifted fiction writer, who is staying at this same hotel. There are so many of these people about that I call them the “saints peres.” I seem to be the only mere. But to get back to your story, or rather, to your work in general. I see even more clearly with this story what you are about. It is original. Nobody else has done anything just like it. And it is something that much needs to be done. I’d sort of like to write something about your work—I’m beginning to feel that I might be able to point out some things about it that other people may not have noticed—and I’d like to review your novel when it comes out. Will you let me know as far ahead of time as you can so I can ask either the Times or the Herald-Tribune to let me have it. I suppose Francis Brown would let me have it. But I gather that he got a lot of indignant letters about my Willa Cather review…
Allen [Tate, her husband] flew over to England July sixth for some sort of conference at Oxford. I followed by boat, with our impedimenta. We had a fine time at Oxford—I spent most of my time on the river, with the swans. There are five cygnets this year, all still the colour of lead…
To go back a moment to your own work. I know that it’s nearly always dangerous to say anything about anybody else’s work, and, in a way, dangerous to become too conscious yourself of what you are doing. But I do feel that one reason your work is so original and powerful is that—for the first time that I know of—the Catholic viewpoint is brought to bear (however unobtrusively!) [for] all sectarian country people in America. It is a rich field and you are certainly the one to work it. I do congratulate you most heartily.
Write and let us know how things go with you. I am wondering whether you made the visit to the Fitzgeralds [Robert and Sally]. We are looking forward to seeing them in October,
With love,
CAROLINE GORDON TO WALKER PERCY
Writing Percy in the fall of 1953 from the American Academy in Rome, Gordon encourages him to keep writing and urges him to come “to Rome, not only for the sake for your enjoyment but also in the course of your apostolate.” The idiom is new in American literary history. Gordon informs Percy that she will send via Percy’s brother, Phinizy, who is visiting Rome, a “fine relic” from “St. Pudenzianas, which to me [Gordon] is the most exciting church in Rome.” Gordon’s sending Percy a sacramental reveals her faith is not abstract but incarnational.
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO CAROLINE GORDON
Reference is made to a lecture at Georgia State College for Women that O’Connor herself attended. She also mentions prayerful intercession for a philanthropist who made possible a writing fellowship. O’Connor consistently did not judge wealthy persons, realizing that perhaps wealth made possible charity. She also admired the business acumen of her own parents.
MILLEDGEVILLE
10 JANUARY 54
You are certainly right about that story but at least I console myself with the fact that it was written five years ago and I’ve improved some. Right now I am back on the subject of Displaced Persons. Anything to get away from Tarwater; also I decided that I had not exhausted the possibilities in that particular situation so now I am busy displacing Mrs. McIntyre. I am going after it very slowly and hope to send it to you in a few weeks. I have a peacock in this one. I aim to render the highest possible justice to the peacock. Have you ever read anything about the peacock as a symbol for the transfiguration? I don’t know if it appeared as that in medieval paintings or tapestries or what. If you know of anywhere I could read about it or see it I would be obliged to hear.
Mr. Ransom [John Crowe] has renewed my Kenyon Fellowship which is a great help. How many minutes a day do you suppose I ought to pray for the repose of Mr. Rockerfeller’s soul? I suppose I ought at least to learn how to spell his name—that don’t look right. I sold that story called “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” to Harper’s Bazaar. I object to having them in there because nobody sees them.
I had a note from Cal [Robert Lowell] who said he was fed up with teaching and wished he lived in a world of illiterates. I thought Brother you may and don’t know it.
I’m afraid my mother doesn’t think highly of my fiction. Anyway she likes the fact that I do it and her tone is greatly softened by the situation of my being her child. If I was anybody elses I would hate to hear what she’d say about it. Robie [Macauley] says that after his mother read his book, she said, “Is it funny? Chuck said it was funny.” When my mother read mine she took it to bed with her every afternoon for about a week. She would start reading and in about ten minutes, she would be snoring. She always says, “That was very interesting,” when she hands anything back to me.
Two weeks off I have to give a talk on the novel to the local college—600 girls who don’t know a novel from a hole in the head. I asked the head of the English Department how she wanted me to approach the subject, what they knew and what they were interested in. She says, “I don’t care how you approach it. They don’t know anything and they aren’t interested in anything but personality.” I am going to tell them that Henry James said that the young woman of the future wouldn’t know anything about mystery or manners. Then I am going to tell them that the novel is a celebration of mystery. It’s going to take me a half hour. Afterwards I am promised a Coca Cola in the Student Union. Pray for everybody.
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO CAROLINE GORDON
O’Connor continues to work on individual stories for the collection that would be published in 1955, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories. She recounts tensions between “displaced persons” and an African American on the dairy farm, a conflict that would reappear in “The Displaced Person.” Regina O’Connor, however, unlike the matriarch in the story, exercises charitable authority to resolve issues.
MILLEDGEVILLE
8 FEBRUARY 54
I am fixing up the front of that story. It does read very flat. Miss Caetani wrote me a note asking for the one Mr. Ransom [John Crowe] had and I wrote her a politeness to the effect that he had it and told her I had sent you another but I didn’t think I was finished with it; as I am not. If she likes it, I suppose she can have it when I am through with it but my concern right now is to get them published before Fall so I can have out this collection. I think she only has two issues a year or something; maybe she won’t want it which will suit me just as well. Incidentally, I called her Miss. What am I supposed to call her? The Mozely T. Sheppard in me objects to calling her anything else. I refuse to be any urbaner than I have to be. Anyway, if she likes it well enough to want the corrected version, would you ask her to let me know and I’ll send it to her.
It has been on my conscience to send Poor Ritt something. Do you know Poor Ritt? I don’t know why I should call him Poor but he has written me about how much money he has lost on A. D., and of other of his trials. A. D. was something they started at Fordham, or something somebody started at Fordham, anyway it was no good, just terrible in fact, and he has taken it over and is trying to make something of it. Poor Ritt and I remember each other in our prayers but I have never met him. He has a nine year old child that he hasn’t seen in nine years—wife departed and “remarried.” M. Maritain is now a contributing editor, I think, and other people.
I was thinking about going to see the Fitzgeralds in the spring but my doctor squashed that one. Too much risk, said he. He says I have enough blood to be a Southern girl, I better not be anything else.
The D.P. and Shot nearly choked each other in the wagon the other day and now my mother is almost afraid to send them to the field together for fear one won’t come back. She gave him a long lecture that night through Alfred, the 12 yr old boy. She kept saying, “You tell your father that he’s a gentleman, that I KNOW he’s a gentleman, and that gentlemen don’t fight with poor negroes like Shot that don’t have any sense.” I think he then told his father in Polish that she said Shot didn’t have any sense. Father agreed. Too much agreement. She knew it hadn’t gone through and started again. “You tell your father that he is, etc.” Finally Alfred admitted he didn’t know what a gentleman was, even in English. She was very successful in communicating with Shot, however. “Now Shot,” she said, “you are very intelligent. You are much too intelligent to fight with a man that we can’t understand very well, now you know you are above this, etc. etc.” He agreed with every word, but said Mr. Matysiak had hit him first.
I had a note from Paul Engle [Iowa Writers’ Workshop] today after I had written to congratulate him on his O. Henry collection. He said the Saturday Review had just attacked it and the Workshop. He seemed sad about it but I think it’s obviously an honor.
Love and thank you for seeing that story. I am going after it.
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO PETER TAYLOR
A publisher had apparently sent O’Connor a collection of Taylor’s stories. The publisher perhaps hoped to obtain a blurb for the dust jacket from O’Connor.
MILLEDGEVILLE, GA.
15 APRIL 54
Harcourt, Brace sent me a copy of your new collection [A Long Fourth and Other Stories] and I reckon I ought to thank them instead of you but I would rather thank you so that I can say that I admire your stories so very much and have for a long time. I always read them several times, hoping I will learn something painlessly. This may be an extravagant hope. My favorite story is still the one called “Skyline” in the other collection and I would like to write one that good some day.
It occurs to me to say also that I have just seen Kenyon Review and observe with horror that my story has got a new last line. I suppose this is my fault as I added it to the proofs—but not at that point. I attribute its removal to the end to some learned printer. In any case, it doesn’t do much for the story.
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO CAROLINE GORDON
Reference is made to a publisher, including in O’Connor’s collection The Artificial Nigger. The title story became one of her favorites. At the end of the story she created a powerful crucifixion image of African American suffering that functioned like a Station of the Cross in the liturgical penitential rite of Lent. Penitents meditate on images of suffering from the Passion of Christ. In “The Artificial Nigger,” a dedicated racist is convicted of his own bigotry when he gazes at a cruciform statue. O’Connor’s intentions are laudable, as revealed in A Prayer Journal, where she beseeches God, “Please let Christian principles permeate my writing.”24 In the reception of the story, however, over the years, O’Connor’s intentions, like those of Twain and Faulkner, have been eclipsed by the emotional impact of the racial slur she used, even leading to the banning of O’Connor’s stories in some Catholic schools.25
MILLEDGEVILLE
27 OCTOBER 54
I met Bob Giroux in Atlanta yesterday and he told me your daughter had been ill and that you had been back some time. I will pray for her—he said she was better. I have not heard from anybody in great lengths of time but I suppose all my acquaintances are as glad to get shut of the summer as I am. Grace after the season. He told me about Cal [Robert Lowell].
We’ve been besieged lately by rabid foxes—to the extent that we’ve lost three cows, one a good one, of hydrophobia—so the government has come in and set traps. Every morning the traps have to be investigated. I never knew so many skunks, possums & coons had been created. Every night the negroes take home a possum or so and yesterday they went with two possums, a coon, & a fox-squirril. I asked the colored woman how she cooked the coon and she said, “First I boils him and then I bakes him.” I was going to ask her to send me a piece but now I’m not sure I want him.
Where are the Fitzgeralds? I last heard they were in some kind of moated castle belonging to one of Mr. Pound’s connections and this was teeming with theirs and other people’s children.
I have a new story called “The Artificial Nigger,” that I want to send you if you are not too busy & if you are really in Minnesota. Apparently Harcourt is going to put out my collection of stories in August. I have ten & have gone over them and removed all such words as “squinch,” “skrunch,” “scrawnch,” etc.
I managed to raise two peachickens this summer. They are fearfully tame and both are vicious. I can’t tell what sex they are yet though a man we had working out here told me that the way to tell is you hold the chicken upsidedown by its two front toes and if it tries to turn rightsideup again, it’s a hen and if it just hangs down, it’s a rooster. He swore this was a sure way and that he had used it many times to separate three-day-old chickens. One of mine turned up and the other hung down but they still look exactly alike.
Remember me to Allen.
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO CAROLINE GORDON
O’Connor mentions Lon Cheney’s working for the Tennessee governor, Frank G. Clement. O’Connor also mentions a televangelist and connects the scene of his preaching to a character in Wise Blood.
MILLEDGEVILLE
10/23/53
This is absolutely the last one of these things I am going to let myself write until I have my foot well on Tarwater’s [early version, Francis Marion Tarwater, The Violent Bear It Away] neck again. I would like to know if it works or not. I’m afraid the end is too abrupt. After about 18 pages I always get the to-hell-with-it feeling and sign off. I think the reason I don’t help the reader over the stile is because I am too busy getting myself over it. I don’t always know what’s happened even after it has.
Let me know where the Fitzgeralds [Sally and Robert] are when you find out and give them my blessings. My mother wants to know where to send their fruit cake. She has her fruit cake seizure about this time of year and there’s nothing to be done about it but get out of the way.
Robie [Macauley] writes me that the Lowells [Robert and Elizabeth] have bought a big old house in Duxbury, Mass. Mansion about 300 years old, from which they aim to commute to Iowa. Cal also has a big old Packard named “The Green Hornet.” I hope Elizabeth does the driving. The Fitzgeralds thought Cal was going to be at Cincinnati this year but apparently he is still at Iowa [Writers’ Workshop].
Lon [Cheney] wrote that he was back at fiction after doing the Governor’s paper work for his conference with the President [Eisenhower] about TVA [Tennessee Valley Authority]. It was very successful he says. His Governor Clement is a big friend of Billy Ghrame [Graham, the evangelist]. I saw old Billy on the tellyvision this summer at my aunt’s in Boston. They had a real repulsive announcer—the good-looking cream variety—and then a real repulsive singer—same kind—and then Billy. Billy was very vigorous and less repulsive than the other two but I suspect they were chosen so that this would be the case. He looks like Onnie Jay Holy only he’s better dressed.
I think Mr. Ransom [John Crowe] has forgotten I sent him the story and the chapter. Incidentally Cal [Robert Lowell] has a long review of Warren’s poem [Robert Penn, Brother to Dragons] in the last Kenyon [Review]; he read it three times, he says. I read the part that came out last year but haven’t read the whole thing; I have no perception about poetry though. I can tell Edgar Guest from Shakespear—that is about all.
LON CHENEY TO FLANNERY O’CONNOR
Three years have passed since Cheney wrote a seminal article on Wise Blood. A speechwriter for Governor Clement of Tennessee, Cheney writes (July 19, 1956) to enlist O’Connor in support of his efforts to influence the 1956 Democratic convention.
…The chief reason for my using a dummy committee—which I will call the Committee for Renewing the Democratic Party, or something of the sort—is that I must publish under a soubriquet or anonymously in order not to embarrass Governor Clement before the Convention. The article is, of course, freely critical of the Democratic Party as well as the Republican Party and could prove embarrassing for him if my name was connected with it. I intend to by-line it A Life Long Democrat…
As you can imagine, I am in a terrible swivet in preparation for the Convention which Our Boy [Governor Clement] will keynote…”26
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO BRAINARD CHENEY
O’Connor agrees to serve on a political committee, noting she will listen to Governor Clement, whose speech, written by Cheney, electrified a sleepy Democratic convention.27 Bill Clinton, elected President of the United States in 1992, also listened to Clement’s speech in which the governor famously accused President Eisenhower of staring down the “green fairways of indifference.” Criticism of presidential golf has remained a bipartisan topic from President Eisenhower to Donald Trump. President Bush gave up golf during the Iraq war, while Donald Trump criticized President Obama for too much golfing. Once elected, President Trump has happily enjoyed the fairways with famous champions such as Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus, and awarded the Medal of Freedom to Woods on May 6, 2019.
20 JULY 1956
I’ll be real pleased to have my name on the dummy committee…it sounds mighty congenial.
I’ve been sitting with my ear glued to the radio when Brother Clement makes his oration. May St. Thomas balance Billy Ghrame.28
CAROLINE GORDON TO FLANNERY O’CONNOR
Gordon is working on a novel, The Malefactors, while reading O’Connor’s story about Tarwater, who would eventually become the rebellious prophet in The Violent Bear It Away. The Malefactors features a moody, condescending, unfaithful husband given to financial mismanagement and advancing his literary career. Gordon mentions the sullenness of the characters in the two works, perhaps reflecting her own troubled marriage.
VIA ANGELO MASINA 5
(PORTA SAN PANCRAZIO)
ROMA
[OCT. 31, 1953]
I finished the first section of my novel the other day [The Malefactors]—it took only seven chapters to carry the hero from breakfast to the time when he sank around four o’clock in the morning into a troubled sleep. I hardly know which is the more sullen companion—he or Tarwater. You wouldn’t think it to look at—or listen to him—but he’s busy with his Fiery Crosses, too. Seems they all are, one way or another. Anyhow, I made the mistake of turning my back on him long enough to do a bit of sightseeing and here it’s three weeks I been letting him lay—and without the kind of excuse you have for turning your back on Tarwater…
“The Displaced Person” has some of the most brilliant passages you’ve written, notably Mrs. Shortley’s conversations with the two Negroes. I like them so much I’ve read them aloud to various people, all of whom have gone into the proper stitches over them. Allen [Tate] likes them, too. In fact, our reactions to the story seem to be about the same. I’m going to give them to you as best I can, but for Heaven’s sake remember that I may very well not know what I’m talking about. I’m really just thinking aloud—mulling over what seems to me to be the problem. We both feel that the story doesn’t quite come off at the end, though superb up till then. Neither of us is quite sure what the trouble is. I’ll hazard some guesses.
Mrs. Shortley’s vision, though fine in itself, doesn’t seem to be integral to the story. The connection between the vision and the denouement isn’t established, really, seems to me. If the vision is in there it ought to “work,” ought to have some particular job to do.
I am wondering whether the trouble, after all, isn’t in the handling of the viewpoint at the end? I don’t like the touch of levity (“I have been made regular etc.”) in this context. It cuts the ground out from under Mrs. Shortley’s feet, makes her pathetic rather than tragic. But you have been building her up for a tragic role—a mountain of a woman, or at any rate, a woman of larger size than most of her companions, a woman who thinks as deeply as she can, and, certainly, ponders even if she isn’t capable of ratiocination.
It seems to me that the denouement ought to take place on a larger stage. Mrs. Shortley ought to see herself in somewhat the same position as those heaps of bodies dead, naked people that she saw in the movies. Damn it! She ought to see or feel herself and Mr. Shortley being dismembered!
As I see it, the structure of the story rests on three supporting scenes, the way a roof might rest on three columns: the sight of all those naked, dead bodies in the movies, the vision and the command to prophesy and, lastly, her realization of what it is she is prophesying: hers and her husband’s destruction.
Mr. and Mrs. Shortley are Displaced Persons, Dismembered Persons, more displaced, more painfully dismembered than the Gobblehooks [Guizacs], if they only knew it, and your story is Mrs. Shortley’s realization of what is happening to them. It’s all there—and magnificently—it seems to me. All you have to do is bring out a little more what is already implicit in your action…
Hastily, with love,
By the way, it’s “carcase,” not “carcus.” Also, I don’t at all like “squinch” on page 21. Here is an example of the thing I was talking about in my last letter. There is no such word as “squinch.” It is not in the vocabulary of the omniscient narrator, who is above colloquialisms and that sort of thing. The word therefore can come only from Mrs. Shortley’s vocabulary. The use of Mrs. Shortley s vocabulary, which is to say, her view-point here, abruptly contracts the field of vision and also lowers the tone of the action—at the moment when you need a wider vision and an exalted tone.
You have here, in a nut-shell, it seems to me, the chief weakness in your work: the tendency to use too restricted a viewpoint at crucial moments, thereby cutting down the scope of your action. You are superbly agile in slipping in and out of your characters, borrowing their eyes and ears and mouths in the interest of verisimilitude. In fact, it is through this very agility that you achieve some of your finest effects but I would like to see you learn to do something else—to soar above the conflict, to view it as if through the eyes of an eagle, at certain crucial moments. And this passage is one of those moments. After all, you have a more exalted subject matter than any of the other young writers. Your language ought to match it—but without relinquishing anything of what you have already got, not even one double negative. Of course this will be hard to do but you have got what it takes to do it. I feel very certain of that.
I think that this group of stories you’ve just done are among the finest that have been written by any American.
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO CAROLINE GORDON
O’Connor mentions visiting friends at Cold Chimneys in Smyrna, Tennessee. O’Connor entertained her friends, including the editor of The Sewanee Review and his wife, by reading a story.
MILLEDGEVILLE
18 DECEMBER 53
I have just got back from spending a weekend with the Cheneys. I like them both very much. Lon seems to be in the middle of one novel but wanting to write a different one. I suppose you always want to be writing a different one. They had the Spears [Dr. and Mrs. Monroe] up Saturday night and I read them the Displaced Person, having doctored on the end of it according to your directions. I took off the mama and papa business and added a sentence to the effect that they (the girls) had never known that she had been displaced or that now her displacement was at an end. You were right: it gives it another dimension.
The D.P. is currently telling Shot, the colored man, that he can get him a wife from Germany but that he’ll have to pay five hundred dollars for her. My mother says “Oh get out, Mr. Matisiak, you know all those folks over there are white.” She has had a lot of trouble anyway with Shot’s matrimonial complications. He is estranged from his first wife who used to have him put in jail every month because he wouldn’t support his child. My mother finally after paying his bond several times has it arranged so that she sends the check for the child every month—twelve dollars. She was talking to mother the other day and told her that she was mighty tired of having to be Shot’s bookkeeper (she also pays his policy man, his board, & his incidental debts). His mother said well she wished he’d go back to his wife and then he wouldn’t have to send out that twelve dollars every month. My mother says why you know that woman doesn’t want him back. “Oh yesm she do,” his mother said, “she wants him worsen a hog wants slop.” I happened to be present and nearly fell off my chair but my mother didn’t bat an eye until the old woman had gone, then she said, “I hope you are not going to use that in one of those stories.” Of course I am as soon as I can find me a place to.
You would probably be interested in Mrs. Steven’s children’s Sunday school organization. It is called the Meriwether Mites. Meriwether is their community. Very Very Very Methodist. The Mites are mostly interested in the social opportunities in religion; the decent ones that is. They have “no drinking, no smoking, and no setting around in cars.”
The story I enclose is one of those old ones that I am undecided about including in the collection. It is very funny when read aloud but I’m afraid there’s not much to be said for it otherwise. Anyway I’d like to know what you think.
I hope your mobbing experiences are over. The people I saw in Nashville were powerful interested in it. Merry Christmas.
CAROLINE GORDON TO FLANNERY O’CONNOR
Gordon engages in copyediting, even the colloquialisms in “The Artificial Nigger.” Earlier she had praised Walker Percy’s presentation of “the Negro problem” in The Charterhouse. The title, however, of O’Connor’s story at the time of its composition in the 1950s does not present a similar “problem,” perhaps because the spiritual meaning of the story was obvious to Gordon and O’Connor, but would not be to many others in later years.
Gordon also embraces the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung both for counseling and aesthetics. Unlike Gordon, O’Connor and Walker Percy would remain steadfast in their skepticism of Jung as a helpful influence on their writing and faith. In the late 1950s, Percy would concur with O’Connor in a long, unpublished essay, “An Apology.” Percy argues that Jung was unable to embrace the central claims of Christianity. Instead, Percy notes, he essentially grouped Christianity with other world religions. They all shared similar archetypical or mythical patterns.29 In another unpublished essay, Percy notes that Jewish exiles in the Old Testament are little different from any other dispossessed people in world history. As a result, the biblical chronicle of the Jewish quest for the Promised Land is just another mythical pattern for categorization.30
1409 EAST RIVER ROAD
MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA
[FALL 1954]
Business before pleasure—as our vagabond cook, Willie, said when Allen wanted her to sweep the front porch and she felt called to the post office, to get a real special delivery letter. You asked for it and here it is:
As usual, I think you have improved your story by revision. (one reason that makes me reluctant to advise you is the danger that in re-working a story you will lose some of the good stuff. People nearly always do. But I don’t think you do). I shall now treat this revised version as if it were coming out of my own work-shop. I would read it over now, for God knows the how manyeth time,) for tone and dramatic effect.
I think you can improve your first paragraph. The tone is not yet elevated enough, authoritative enough for the story you have to tell. Its subject matter is even more important than the subject matter in Joyce’s “Araby,” and look at the high and mighty tone he takes throughout that story of something that has happened to every one of us in our time—to be promised a treat as a child and then disappointed. Joyce takes that universal experience and makes it an analogue of man’s situation in the universe, a small, lonely figure under a vast, dark dome, a figure whose eyes “burn with anguish and anger” as the child-man realizes his plight. Your story is about an old man who realizes that all along he has been no better than a child. Your subject matter entitles you to take an even higher tone. So does your Christianity, which Joyce forsook and which you didn’t.
Have you ever studied any of the paragraphs in Joyce’s short stories or in “The Portrait”? It is very rewarding. Each paragraph has in it at least three kinds of sentences and each sentence does its appointed task with something that approaches perfection. You should learn to write the long, complicated—in the sense that it carries a lot of stuff—kind of sentence with which Joyce ends “The Dead.” You ought to have a sentence like that to end this story with. The sentence you end isn’t quite strong enough, not weighty enough…
Your story has the same form, the same three great supports: First, Mr. Head in the moonlight, second, Mr. Head and Nelson waiting for the train. I don’t think you give this scene enough attention. III corresponds to Dante’s “mid-way in the forest of our life.” You ought to set this scene more carefully—that is by using more sensuous detail—ought to make it more mysterious, for it is the “forest” out of which your action will emerge. You go at it too fast and don’t choose your words carefully enough; “Stuck” is not good there. Set the scene. Were there any trees there? If so, how did they look then? Did the tracks run through a flat place or did the train emerge from a small defile? Were the tracks straight or was there a bend? You do put the trees in but too late to have the right effect…
It’s dangerous for me to say this to a young writer who is such a master of colloquial dialogues as you are, but I dare say it just because you are such a master. Your dialogue delights me. I wouldn’t like to see less of it in your stories. I ask only to see it more set off, better displayed. That can be done, I think, by elevating the tone of the rest of the story—more beautiful, high-toned sentences. More paragraphs without a colloquial word or phrase in them. In that way you would get contrast that would make you[r] dialogue sparkle even more than it does.
Faulkner can do it—when he’s in the groove, but he, poor fellow, is bogged down, I judge from his last book, in what Allen calls “Mississippi theology.” You have an advantage over him there. For God’s sake make the most of it!
Allen and I have been reading a lot of Jung recently. It’s amusing and exciting to watch him making his way to the Church by way of alchemical symbols in the dreams of his patients! We are also reading a book by a Fr. Victor White called “God and the Unconscious,” a discussion of Jung and Freud, which Allen is going to send poor Cal [Robert Lowell] for Christmas. (How I wish I could wrap that boy up and mail him to a good Jungian practitioner). I think you’d find this book very interesting, also a book of Jung’s called Religion and Alchemy (Pantheon Press.) It is fascinating and ought to be very helpful to any fiction writer. It is to me, at least.
By the way, you ought to be able to get any book you need through your local library. They ought to purchase any book you need for your work if they follow the almost universal custom of extending special courtesies to writers. If they don’t you can get them to order books from the Library of Congress’ Inter-Library loan service.
I’ve got to get to work on the ill-wrought paragraphs of a promising old writer named Gordon. Love and congratulations on your revision. I don’t think you’ve lost a thing and you’ve gained an awful lot by the revision.
ALLEN TATE TO FLANNERY O’CONNOR
As the detailed copyediting of O’Connor’s fiction proceeds, Tate’s presence is primarily through absence. In this letter, however, he praises “Good Country People,” and plans to read it to a class. O’Connor—not Hemingway, not Faulkner, not Joyce—could better capture the attention of distracted college students in a story about a Bible salesman stealing an atheist philosopher’s wooden leg.
While Tate recognizes the dramatic power of O’Connor’s story for teaching, he himself was uninspiring in the classroom. He usually entered class with a patrician air wearing a tweed jacket and sometimes puffing from a cigarette in a holder like President Roosevelt. He dispensed C papers to undergraduates struggling with poetry expositions—Eliot, Yeats, Lowell, for example. Tate once returned an essay to me with a superior admonition: “What that poem says is obvious to me but not to you.”31
Other critical observations by Tate in this letter reveal his brilliance. The “maimed souls” reference in relation to “Good Country People” reiterates the story’s rootedness in Dante’s Inferno, a harrowing narrative of dismemberment and cannibalism in the darkest places of Hell. Tate recognizes that O’Connor’s storytelling emanates from the Florentine master, Dante himself.
FEBRUARY 22, 1955
I have just read “Good Country People,” and I admire it greatly. It is without exception the most terrible and powerful story of Maimed Souls I have ever read. This kind of soul is obviously your subject, in whatever situation you may embody it; and this new fiction is a landmark in your treatment of it.—Much of your power comes of isolating the world in which these maimed persons live; they suddenly appear with the mystery of a natural force, or perhaps of the supernatural force of evil. So this is just a note to congratulate you. Here and there, I was disturbed by details and little touches that I didn’t understand. When in the expository and narrative passages Hulga is referred to as the Child, I can’t tell who thinks of her so. Here the “point of view” is in question; for if it is the narrator calling her the Child, I fear it won’t do; for the narrator has not established herself in the action or as an observer; and she can’t really have any views. Moreover it seems to me that Hulga’s Ph.D. is unreal as you present it; nothing in Hulga’s conversation or behavior, before the coming of the Bible salesman, indicates that she has this side to her character. We simply must take your word for it. If you could give it fictional reality, it would do better the work that I suppose you intend it to do; that is, to stand for the spiritual maiming corresponding to her physical maiming, and thus to make quite plain her vulnerability to the advances of the Bible salesman. I am sure that Caroline has mentioned these points and commented on them more searchingly than I have. You are a wonderful writer, and you started out with the first instinct of a good writer: you write only about the life you know. I am wondering whether you know Chekhov’s little story “On the Road.” The scene is as limited as yours, and the characters suffer, not exactly a spiritual wound, but a failure of charity which is also an aspect of your typical theme. Nevertheless, without seeming to do so, Chekhov manages to place the crisis of the story in a larger spiritual world.
I have mentioned to my class in Southern literature the names of three Southern writers who are masters of Southern rural dialect: Elizabeth Roberts, Caroline and you. Before you can ask me not to, I am going to read “Good Country People” to my class on Thursday. The way your people talk is a marvel to read.
Ever yours,
Allen
Why can’t the story be in your book?
ALLEN TATE TO WALKER PERCY
Three years before Tate’s praise of O’Connor, he expresses reservations to Percy about The Charterhouse. Tate, however, recognizes Percy’s gifts, in particular the implicit theology of the novel that Percy would fully explore later in a penetrating essay, “Stoicism in the South.”32 Tate’s theological speculation leads to a “digression” about a fellow Southern Agrarian—and novelist. In the postscript Tate recognizes the beginnings of Percy’s satirical treatment of Anglican gentility and faith. Once the satirical seed was planted, Percy distanced himself from the Anglican patrimony that appears in nuanced mockery in later novels such as The Moviegoer and The Second Coming. A convert to Catholicism, and having experienced, unlike most readers, the high-toned Anglican community of Sewanee, Tate appreciates Percy’s satire.
1801 UNIVERSITY AVENUE SOUTHEAST
MINNEAPOLIS 14, MINNESOTA
JANUARY 1, 1952
Dear Walker:
I finished reading your novel yesterday. I am not sure that I can add anything to what Caroline has written you, and I may merely repeat what she said; I didn’t read her commentary. It is a most impressive job, and I hope that you will be able to do the revisions necessary to round it out. I don’t think there is anything fundamentally wrong with the book, but I do feel that there must be more work in detail…
Assuming, as I think you also would assume, that a literary technique from one point of view reflects the moral and even religious ideas implicit in the material, I am struck by the shadowy quality of the minor characters. Many of them come to life for a moment, only to sink almost immediately from sight. This literary effect would follow from Ben’s moral condition, a state of sin that maybe described as using others for one’s own ends, even though those ends may be compulsive and irrational, and generally destructive. It seems to me then that one of your problems in revision is to offset this moral implication of the subject-matter by giving the other characters a little more life of their own…What I am trying to say was first said by Aristotle about tragedy—that it is an action, not a quality; that character cannot exhibit its full meaning unless it is involved in an action; and one man isolated, as Ben is isolated, cannot make an action…
I am certain that you can almost at will actualize any portion of the novel, or any character: the minor characters, in so far as we know them at all, we know well. Miss MacGahee is wonderfully done—but what happens to her? She is, of course, the female version of Ben, and not too much could be done with her. I am not sure that you oughtn’t to make Ben’s marriage to Abbie a partial realization of the righting of a wrong: he need not know the full meaning (i.e., the full “conversion”) of the righting of this wrong, but a dim perception of it would give him greater dignity than he has at the end: he would be a man of stature whose imperfect “contrition” would give him a tragic implication.
One more thing. Your Southern business men are beautifully conceived but I think they are overdone: they represent the satire of the author rather than the actuality; they are almost allegorical. They don’t, of course, in life, constantly refer to their “class,” etc. By highlighting all this you almost caricature them; and I take it that this quality is scarcely the right coefficient of the seriousness of the hero. Ben’s father, I repeat, is excellent; he has real “specification”; but he tends to be dissolved in the exaggeration of his friends. You are absolutely right that the Roman myth still hangs on the South, and that the South is not really Christian; it is merely reactionary without being traditional.
(When Andrew Lytle [editor of The Sewanee Review, and novelist and professor] says he can’t join the Catholic Church because it isn’t in the Southern tradition, what he ought to mean is that the South has no tradition without the Church; for the thing that we all still cherish in the South was originally and fundamentally Catholic Christianity. Andrew’s position is sheer idolatry—worship of a golden calf, mere secularism—and alas his views are more representative today than yours or mine—or yours and mine. Twenty years ago I knew that religion was the key to the South [as it is to everything else] but I didn’t see far enough then.)
Well, that digression is not criticism of your novel. One more suggestion, I hope a practicable one: why not review the progression of incidents, and decide which ones are crucial? Then develop each one as if it were a distinct bit of action? This wouldn’t necessitate as much rewriting as you might think. It seems to me that this process might correct the faulty scale of the book as it is. There is too much before Ben returns to the Retreat, if there is going to be so little after; I think there’s just about enough after; so perhaps the other end should be scaled down.
The dream about the Church is not convincing, and I can’t think of a way to make it convincing. I see what you are up to, and the equivalent at least is probably necessary. My hunch is that the rounding out of Ignatz from the beginning would almost do the equivalent thing.
I congratulate you. You have great intelligence and power, and you’re going to be a valuable novelist.
Ever yours,
Allen
P.S. The satire of Sewanee [University of the South] as a psychiatric retreat is wonderful—effective in itself, but with an added dimension for those of us who know Sewanee.33
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO CAROLINE GORDON AND ALLEN TATE
O’Connor mentions the autobiographical theme in “Good Country People,” revealing that without faith she might have been like the story’s atheist intellectual, Hulga. Another O’Connor story, “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” contains insights about her adolescence, while “Revelation” contains autobiographical elements of her struggles as an adult with a deadly illness.
MILLEDGEVILLE
1 MARCH 55
I do appreciate both your letters and I am glad to have my opinion on that story confirmed. I really thought all the time it was the best thing I had done. Hit (it) was a seizure. Anyway, Mrs. Freeman’s remarks are not much credit to me. She lives on this place and all I have to do is sit at the source and reduce it a little so it’ll be believable. As for the other lady I have known several of her since birth and as for Hulga I just by the grace of God escaped being her; the Bible salesman also came without effort. I am mighty afraid he is my hidden character.
I have corrected the business about the child and now only use it from the mother’s point of view. This is a great improvement. Then I have added two touches to support the intellectual life of Hulga; one, like you said about the name, and the name’s working like Vulcan in the furnace, etc. Hulga thinks that one of her greatest triumphs is that her mother has not been “able to turn her dust into Joy, but the greater one was that she had been able to turn it herself into Hulga.” That helps some. Then while Mrs. Hopewell is thinking about Hulga and how she is getting more bloated, rude and squint-eyed every day, I stick in this (from Mrs. Hopewell’s viewpoint):
“And she said such strange things! To her own mother she had said—without warning, without excuse, standing up in the middle of a meal with her face purple and her mouth half full—“Woman! Do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what you are not? God!” she had cried sinking down again and staring at her plate, “Malbranche was right: we are not our own light! We are not our own light!” Mrs. Hopewell had no idea, to this day, what brought that on. She had only made the remark (hoping Joy would take it in) that a smile never hurt anyone.”
Anyhow, with these changes, I sent it airmail to Giroux and he wired me he would try to get it in the collection if it didn’t cost too much to throw away the old type and do the resetting [A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, 1955]. Seems there can’t be but so many pages or they will go broke. I was to get the proofs this week so I suppose he could wring my neck.
I know you are glad to get out from under that novel, or anyway where you can see out. If I could just get where I could see a little daylight in mine I would be happy. It hasn’t moved an inch in 18 months and when I stop it and write a story I feel like I am letting myself down from the penitentiary by a rope. I mean a thread.
The story of Powers [J. F.] in the O’Henry collection is better than any of the others in the book. If you ever see him I wish you would tell him he has one solid admirer in Georgia.
CAROLINE GORDON TO MR. AND MRS. ANDREW LYTLE
Gordon writes from Sherman, Connecticut, where she is visiting Walker Percy’s agent, Susan Jenkins. Gordon describes the impact of a public reading by Flannery O’Connor. Serial murders interwoven with discussion of the Resurrection were meant to both entertain and provoke genteel critics.
Lytle would have appreciated O’Connor’s reading. Trained as an actor at the Yale School of Drama, Lytle was a gifted teacher who mesmerized students in his classroom performances of O’Connor’s stories at the Universities of the South [Sewanee] and Florida [Gainesville]. When he was editor of The Sewanee Review, students from his classes and other admirers congregated at the “Log Cabin,”Lytle’s ancestral home in Monteagle, Tennessee. Lytle would simply resume his class on his front porch or beside the fire, where more unforgettable teaching occurred.
An undergraduate might imbibe highballs served in silver cups with “Mr. Lytle,” and assorted luminaries in town might appear for the evening. These might include the novelist, Eudora Welty; the Faulkner scholar, Cleanth Brooks; Lytle’s fellow Agrarian, novelist Robert Penn Warren; the biblical scholar, the Reverend William H. Ralston, Jr.; Thomas (“Tam”) Carlson, of the English faculty at Sewanee; the Reverend K. Logan Jackson, dynamic president of the national campaign to preserve the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer, his wife, Mary Lyman [Scott] Jackson—concert pianist, brilliant writer, and the cofoundress of Exodus Youth Services (Washington, D.C.), and many others. Sometimes appearing in black dancing slippers, Lytle might recall his adventures as an actor or his experiences boxing.34 He praised O’Connor, while noting Faulkner’s shortcomings. He lauded Joyce, noting that Portrait of the Artist was about the integrity of the artist who would not serve a corrupt Church. (The observation has renewed cogency with the unfolding scandal in the Catholic Church.) Lytle lamented the liturgical revisions of the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer that resulted in the gutting of Anglicanism’s claim of Catholic orthodoxy. Mr. Lytle proclaimed that the “Episcopal bishops no longer believed that Jesus was the son of God.” He decried “the puritans” and admonished his guests to “use the gifts of God.” Lytle repeatedly praised Thomas More, often quoting his famous line “I die my king’s good servant but God’s first.”35 “Mr. Lytle” as a host, conversationalist, and raconteur was a legendary, magnetic personality who had an impact on many students and admirers.36
SHERMAN, CONNECTICUT
JUNE 15, 1955
Dear Andrew and Edna:
Here is a letter which I thought I had mailed to you two months ago. Seems I wrote it just before I went to that symposium where I had to preside over a “Faulkner panel.” There were two talks on Faulkner, by young profs from Catholic universities. They swallowed the symbolism—and the screwy theology—in “A Fable,” hook line and sinker. I had only two or three minutes in which to set forth my views. I read from your piece: the part that says that this work is begotten by an act of will etc. The speakers did not like what you said at all, but the sisters loved it. It really went over big, and it was handy for me to quote from another writer instead of trying to set forth my own views. But enough of Faulkner panels…
I am still reading Erich Neuman’s The History and Origin of Consciousness and think it is about the best book I ever read, next to holy Writ.37 I am anxious to see what you all think of it and asked Sue Jenkins to send you the copy I lent her but she never got around to it and now I have to keep the copy to use in a lecture I am trying to get ready for Indiana.
I see by some advertisement I read, Andrew, that you think as much of Flannery O’Connor’s work as I do. She is certainly a remarkable person and a remarkable writer. She spent a week end with us recently. We had the Van Wyck Brookses [The Flowering of New England] and the Cowleys [Malcolm] over for dinner. After dinner Van Wyck insisted that Flannery read one of her stories. She was quite willing and wanted to read “Good Country People,” but there were several elderly ladies present and I simply could not see them taking that scene in the hay-loft, where the Bible salesman tries to seduce the one legged Ph.D. and switched her on to “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” which is shocking enough, God knows. Van Wyck said later that it was sad to see such a talented young writer have such a pessimistic view of life. He said that he found the experiences of her characters “alien to the American way of life.” He said that he and Gladys had driven all over this country and found nothing but loving-kindness!
James Waller is going to visit us ad Dulce Donum this summer and we hope the Cheneys will come by on their way up here. They expect to spend September with Sue. I wish you all were coming, too. We expect—and fervently hope—that this summer will be less hectic than last summer. The Lord does sometimes temper the wind to—elderly—shorn—sheep.
Love for both of you and for the girls,
as ever,
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO ANDREW LYTLE
The letter is representative of O’Connor’s respect for a vital mentor and teacher. He had instructed O’Connor at Iowa about Wise Blood and recognized its originality and power. He witnessed a rare occurrence in the classroom: O’Connor’s classmates giving her a standing ovation after her reading the novel. Over a decade later, O’Connor remains grateful for his consistent support and understanding.
MILLEDGEVILLE
4 FEBRUARY 60
Dear Andrew,
I feel better about the book, knowing you think it works. I expect it to get trounced but that won’t make any difference if it really does work. There are not many people whose opinion on this I set store by.
I have got to the point now where I keep thinking more and more about the presentation of love and charity, or better call it grace, as love suggests tenderness, whereas grace can be violent or would have to be to compete with the kind of evil I can make concrete. At the same time, I keep seeing Elias in that cave, waiting to hear the voice of the Lord in the thunder and lightning and wind, and only hearing it finally in the gentle breeze, and I feel I’ll have to be able to do that sooner or later, or anyway keep trying.
There is a moment of grace in most of the stories, or a moment where it is offered, and is usually rejected. Like when the Grandmother recognizes the Misfit as one of her own children and reaches out to touch him. It’s the moment of grace for her anyway—a silly old woman—but it leads him to shoot her. This moment of grace excites the devil to frenzy.
The book [The Violent Bear It Away] is going to be published by Longmans, Green in England. After they read the manuscript, they wrote to inquire what the significance was of Tarwater’s violation in the woods by the man in the motor car. Besides the fact that nobody knows about the devil now, I have to reckon on the fact that baptism is just another idiocy to the general reader. A lady-librarian reviewing it in the Library Journal said that there was not “enough convincing action to bring this macabre tale to a successful conclusion.” She also noted that Tarwater added to my “band of poor God-driven Southern whites.” God-driven means underprivileged.
Well any, I am most grateful to you and steadied by you. If you get up this way, please stop with us. Ashley enjoyed his visit with you all. That boy is on the road more than Kerouac, though in a more elegant manner.
Yours,
FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO FATHER SCOTT WATSON
O’Connor writes an erudite Jesuit friend who identified the dramatic sacramentalism and biblical element in The Violent Bear It Away. She also qualifies its connection to a British novel and also quotes a revered teacher.
8 FEBRUARY 60
You can’t know how very much obliged I am to you for your letter. Reading it I felt for the first time that the book actually did work, for you got out of it what I intended to put into it. Of course I won’t find many readers with your equipment to read, either in the literary or religious sense. Most people find baptism just another idiocy, prophecy an anachronism; the Eucharist nothing but a symbol, or rather just a sign. When one writes, or anyway when I do, I have constantly in mind the kind of person I am trying to get my vision across to. For me, this person is always an unbeliever and the strain of making him see is considerable. Perhaps it is too much to ask to make him see. All I really hope to do is disturb him, lose him a night’s sleep maybe.
I’ve read Till We Have Faces [C.S. Lewis] and had mixed feelings about it. It was pretty much allegory. A friend of mine, Andrew Lytle, a very fine novelist [The Velvet Horn, The Hero with the Private Parts], wrote me about my book and said this, “I felt the end of Wise Blood got too allegorical, almost fantasy, in my belief that always there must be the natural action which contains and represents the supernatural or imaginative. Allegory can exist only in an age of belief. People exist today in their personalities, so desperate is our plight.” He felt that this last book of mine was better than Wise Blood because “the symbols seem true symbols, that is containing the action, not signs in place of action.” I am interested in this subject of allegory and symbol. There is a book by a man named Erich Heller called The Disinherited Mind which has a good chapter on the subject.
Once again, my very inadequate thanks.